Re: More metaproblem

[Karl Fogel]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:
>For Emacs to attract new developers, its code and the culture need to
>be discoverable.  As part of this, practice rules need to be *clear*,
>*documented*, and *minimal*.  Right now they fail all three tests.

+1 all over that.

For example, as far as I can see -- and I've looked, though maybe in the
wrong places -- there's never been a permanent sign anywhere, like on a
web page, telling developers when they should commit to release branches
versus when they should commit to master (trunk).

Sometimes trunk is locked down and most commits are supposed to go to
the current emacs-NN branch.  Other times it's not locked down.  And
you're just supposed to know, somehow, I guess by saving random bits of
state gleaned from a rather high-traffic mailing list.

Emacs is not an easy project for newcomers or drive-by contributors.
(And somebody please stop me before I start ranting about debbugs as a
primary bug tracker even when email-enabled things like Redmine are
available, since it's been discussed elsewhere.  Apparently for the
Emacs project in 2014, "send email" is still considered an acceptable UI
gesture for manipulating a bug ticket.)

-K