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Re: Reordering etc/NEWS


From: JD Smith
Subject: Re: Reordering etc/NEWS
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 12:59:22 -0700
User-agent: Pan/0.14.2.91 (As She Crawled Across the Table)

On Wed, 09 May 2007 22:42:34 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I'm not sure what ancient culture and customs you refer to here,
> since you've left them unnamed and unexplained.

Only because I don't know in detail what all the customs are, only
that they exist and are entrenched (similar to how you might perceive
a foreign culture from the outside).

> Even if we confine ourselves only to the C code, Emacs developers
> need to be experts in many diverse areas, such as Lisp language,
> character sets and encodings, display, GUI toolkits (5 for Unix plus
> 4 more for non-Unix platforms), signals and subprocesses, and some
> intricate details of executable image structure (for unexec). Lisp
> code is spread over more than 1000 files and covers even more
> subject-matter ground.  I'm not familiar with any other GNU package
> that could match Emacs in complexity and expertise requirements in
> so many diverse fields.

Absolutely.  On the other hand, I'm certainly not an expert in most of
those things, yet I was able to productively improve features that
needed some attention.  This might indicate, then, that part of the
problem is an insistence on a monolithic release, vs. separating out
core and non-core functionality, with different release cycles.

Anyway, I didn't intend to offer opinion on how to run things, but
simply a single "case study" of the impact of the current setup on a
peripheral developer.






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