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Re: line-move-visual
From: |
Mark Crispin |
Subject: |
Re: line-move-visual |
Date: |
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:12:58 -0000 |
User-agent: |
Alpine 2.00 (OSX 1167 2008-08-23) |
On Thu, 10 Jun 2010, Uday S Reddy posted:
A third suggestion is that we should start thinking of Emacs as
mission-critical software.
It amazes me that anyone would think otherwise.
It is really platform on which a
number of critical services are delivered, for development of projects
or for running of teams and organizations. A lot rides on it and any
changes that potentially cause corruption of files or data can be quite
serious.
As the kids say, "well, duh!"
This discussion is rapidly leading to "is free software suitable as
mission-critical software?".
Some people would be more comfortable is the answer is "no". Then they
don't have to deal with the responsibility of mission-critical software.
Finally, and I might be a bit OTT here, I think we should think of free
software as community-owned software. It is not developer-owned
software (despite the aberration caused by the existence of FSF as a
copyright-owner).
The notion of "community-owned software" works as ideology, but not as
reality. If emacs was really community-owned software, I as a community
member could revert the change in the official distribution sources. And
then there could be revert wars ala Wikipedia.
That existed once upon a time in the mid-1970s, at MIT (the ITS systems)
and elsewhere. It didn't end well.
The dichotomy between "the cathedral and the bazaar" that ESR postulated
doesn't really exist. The full-fledged bazaar option doesn't scale and
never actually happened. It's just two types of cathedrals, one run by a
pope and the other run by a board of laymen.
But even the laymen become power-corrupted.
Free software isn't
"free-to-fork" software, even though the right to fork exists as a last
resort and as a foundation for everything else. If that right needs to
be exercised, it is a signal that the community-ownership of the
software has broken down and that is not good for any of us.
That is certainly true. Again, BSD serves as an example.
Another sign of a process breakdown is when a developer's answer to user
complaints about changes in a new version is "so just run the old
version". The need to revert to an old version means that the new version
is broken.
The corrolary to this is that the standard developer's answer to
complaints about bugs in an old version is "upgrade to the new version".
This only works if the upgrade is a viable option.
Developers can't have it both ways. If they create a new version that is
unacceptable to some portion of the user community, they they have
effectively forked the software.
Responsible developers figure this out after a while. It takes maturity.
Generally, they want their users to be using one, and only one, version;
and they do what is necessary to ensure that there are no barriers to
upgrade.
Since user interface surprise is a barrier to upgrade, they make sure
there aren't any such surprises.
In the real world, people get fired for inflicting surprises in
mission-critical software.
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Re: line-move-visual, (continued)
- Re: line-move-visual, Andreas Politz, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Uday S Reddy, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Stefan Monnier, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Uday S Reddy, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Stefan Monnier, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, despen, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Tassilo Horn, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Uday S Reddy, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Evans Winner, 2010/12/09
- Message not available
- Re: HOWTO: Cowtow to old farts, Xah Lee, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual,
Mark Crispin <=
- Re: line-move-visual, Uday S Reddy, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Mark Crispin, 2010/12/09
- Re: line-move-visual, Tim X, 2010/12/08
- Message not available
- Re: line-move-visual, Tim X, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Joseph Brenner, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Evans Winner, 2010/12/09
- Re: line-move-visual, David Kastrup, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Uday S Reddy, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Tim X, 2010/12/08
- Re: line-move-visual, Evans Winner, 2010/12/09