Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Monday, December 21, 2020 at 11:17 AM
> From: "Richard Stallman" <rms@gnu.org>
> To: "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com>
> Cc: abrochard@gmx.com, bugs@gnu.support, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars
>
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>   > I wonder whether the survey stems from lack of vision of emacs
>   > admin and developers.  For instance, Gcc has a Development Plan.
>   > Suggestions for changes to the plan are discussed on the Gcc
>   > mailing list and can be approved or rejected by the Gcc Steering
>   > Committee. How about Emacs?
>
> GCC has many developers who are paid by various companies.
> That makes it easier to make plans and actually carry them out.
>
> The Emacs contributors are all volunteers, so we can't tell anyone
> what to do.  We can only exhort and apply naked emotional pressure,
> which works only sometimes.

Perhaps not in all details, but at some level it would benefit to
consider an actual plan.  Else things move on quite haphazardly.
For instance, certain changes are better done in a sequence.
And if you are tackling a problem, you can consider tackling
a related one.

We could also motivate by offering small payments for solutions to
unresolved problems.  I am sure there are many whose professional
job is in computing and could get young people to work on some
challenging areas or get their interest in helping out if there was
a plan.

Most people I know don't know what to do or what problems are out there.

> I've been trying for more than 10 years to urge people to work toward
> giving Emacs the document capabilities of a word processor, but I have
> not convinced people to do this work.
>
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
>
>
>
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