Re: New maintainer

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/05/2015 10:02 PM, John Wiegley wrote:

> This is a great question, and one I've been pondering myself, since the most
> pressing variable for me in all of this is time.

I fear that might be a problem.

> Where I think I can contribute best is the bigger picture, or "meta issues":
> weighing in on technical discussions, making higher-level decisions about
> technical direction, keeping an eye on user experience within the community

In the end, you might encounter a lack of clearly defined points when 
someone asks you to make a decision.

More often, the regular contributors already have an idea what they want 
to do in the limited time they can spend working on Emacs, and often 
it's not easy to make such a person change their mind.

Not every change is announced or discussed either, so I think a 
maintainer should be subscribed to emacs-diffs.

Likewise, even if you make a decision that a certain aspect of Emacs 
needs work, there's no guarantee that someone else will readily begin 
working on it.

> and the quality of Emacs resources, coordinating volunteers, ensuring proper
> legal forms are maintained, liaising with the FSF, and assisting other
> maintainers so they don't burnout and receive the help they need.

We really don't have enough volunteers. So an ideal maintainer, IMHO, 
would find ways to energize more people to volunteer, maybe by making 
the contribution process easier somehow (one could mention a better bug 
tracker, code review process, CI, documentation, etc; in short, a lot of 
things could be better, and all of them require work, in the end, rather 
than simply discussions and decisions), making the development process 
more transparent to the community, or, you know, handling a lot of the 
grunt work themselves. Maybe all of the options together.

> Another area we're falling behind in is the type of IDE features that are
> taken for granted in special-purpose editing environments, such as effortless
> code browsing, refactoring, and more interactive debugging. The things you can
> do when editing Java and Javascript are downright impressive, and I see no
> reason Emacs can't compete better here.

That area is closer to my interests, and I'd happily see one more person 
(or several) participate in these discussions, but preferably in 
lower-level terms (like the details of the xref interface, or the 
project API). So far, they've ended more in disagreement than anything 
else, and it's pretty discouraging.