Re: display-buffer-alist simplifications

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
 > > Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:12:34 +0900
 > > Cc: martin rudalics <address@hidden>, Chong Yidong <address@hidden>,
 > >    address@hidden
 > > 
 > > I just hate to see people arguing that code that's in a project
 > > should stay just because it's already in.  That always has the
 > > effect of making it harder to conduct such experiments in the first
 > > place!
 > 
 > A major surgery of one of the Emacs core functionalities, whose
 > development was encouraged by the head maintainers and whose merge
 > onto the trunk was explicitly sanctioned by them, is no longer an
 > ``experiment''.  It was an experiment only as long as it was on a
 > separate branch.  Now it's much more than that.

I'm sorry you take it that way, but it should be clear from reviewing
the context that the word "experiment" was not a description of the
code itself at all!  Use of a modern VCS makes experimenting with code
very cheap, regardless of maintainer encouragement.  Discouraging
"unsanctioned" coding "experiments" is not what I'm talking about here.

Rather, *merging onto the trunk* is always an experiment, ie, a test
of the proposition that the code in its current form will improve
Emacs for the community as a whole.  There's no disrespect toward code
*or* maintainers intended, just an acknowledgement of the fact that we
don't know with certainty whether a particular merge will successfully
improve the project until we try it.