Re: master 1e3b0f2: Improve doc strings of project.el

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 16.07.2020 19:34, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Cc: philip@warpmail.net, theo@thornhill.no, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> > Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2020 22:51:04 +0300
> >
> > I have tried my best to be polite and accommodating in this thread,
>
> Actually, you've never been accommodating, as far as I'm concerned,
> and lately stopped even trying to be polite.

So trying to solve your problems and incorporate your ideas don't count 
as accommodating? I'll try to remember that.

And I accepted all of your edits and additions, right up until the point 
where they started to conflict with the design.

> Completely uncalled-for,
> since I didn't do or say anything that a project maintainer isn't
> supposed to say or do.

As a maintainer of an umbrella project, you're supposed to respect the 
contributors' efforts, and especially the maintainers of subsystems who 
have more understanding about the design and purpose of said subsystems.

But once you get an idea in your mind, you very rarely back down, even 
when confronted with your prior lack of knowledge of how things work, or 
how they are designed to be. Even after I explain those, and spend a lot 
of time doing that. This has happened on multiple occasions.

In this particular situation, I would have been happy to have your help. 
You are a good, thoughtful and diligent documentation writer (*).

But that stops being a benefit once you decide that things must be 
explained exactly how you managed to understand them, and no other way 
can be possibly adequate.

(*) I could have used more assistance in other aspects too, but so far 
the main technical hurdles have all been up to me.

> Challenge away, if you must.  It won't change anything in how I'm
> doing my job as the Emacs maintainer.  Because I have all the
> intentions of doing that job the best I possibly can.  <...>

That's a lot of words to say "things must be exactly as I say for the 
good of the project". The implication being that your experience is 
always best, or that you were chosen as the maintainer for being an 
expert on all aspects of Emacs (spoiler alert: that was not the reason).

You should consider doing something other than "the best you possibly 
can". Otherwise you stifle the alternative views here. And, more 
importantly, the approaches that fall outside of your experience.

Also recall this message: 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-05/msg01711.html. 
Those weren't my words.

> The rest of your message simply reiterates what's been said already,
> so I see no reason to respond to your other points one by one, as I
> already replied to them or their ilk in the past.

If you think this paragraph sounds nice or polite, it probably does. But 
its meaning is anything but.

I'm disappointed to see that all this time spent on explanations has 
been in vain. You even skipped an essential question (or two) that I asked.