Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Óscar Fuentes]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
>
>> What I see on that Merge Request is an occasional contributor adding
>> code related to an internal, debug-related environment variable to avoid
>> its abuse and then making an insulting reference to the people who are
>> advicing others to incur on said abuse. Then another occasional
>> contributor comes to close the comments (good) with a blunt phrase
>> (bad).
>
> What abuse? And the change did not add code, it removed code to prevent
> users from customizing their own systems in a way that the GTK
> developers do not want.  Even though it causes no problems, no bug
> reports, and in general no trouble at all for anyone, especially for
> someone who did not even write the GTK native dialog code.

Suppose you discover that some people are writing customization recipes
on a popular Wiki page that make use of internal Emacs code for whatever
purpose, and you know that once you change that code people will come to
complain about you for breaking their setups.

Of course, that's no excuse for calling names on anyone, but otherwise
what he did is not unreasonable.

> Stop making excuses for the blatant disrespect for users and developers
> carried by the GTK developers.  Here's what the AUTHORS file says:
>
> The current team (GTK 3 and 4)
> ------------------------------
>
> Jonas Ådahl       <jadahl@gmail.com>
> Tim Bäder         <mail@baedert.org>
> Emmanuele Bassi   <ebassi@gnome.org>
> Chun-wei Fan      <fanchunwei@src.gnome.org>
> Matthias Clasen   <mclasen@redhat.com>
> Carlos Garnacho   <mrgarnacho@gmail.com>
> Alexander Larsson <alexl@redhat.com>
> Benjamin Otte     <otte@gnome.org>
>
> Evidently, Benjamin Otte is not just an "occasional contributor".

Well, I said that he is an occasional contributor after looking at his
activity map, which is not very colorful.

OTOH, he belonging to the official team may explain why he was not
censured. That doesn't mean that other team members sympathize with his
action.

>> Implying that that episode illustrates the general attitude of that
>> community and that it is relevant to how Emacs should decide its
>> relation to the products of such community is... unfair, to say it
>> politelly.
>
> Okay, then how about the many MANY times we went to them about the
> display disconnect problem, and were very impolitely rebuffed, with our
> use case(s) dismissed?

There is a bitter disagreement there, for sure. But I've experienced
worse dealing with KDE/Qt maintainers and I still am a happy KDE user.
That is, if you think that by switching to Qt you will deal with more
reasonable and polite people, you are wrong. They are the same kind of
human beings, like we are here.

> Or recently:
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2022-08/msg00687.html
>
> Where they made the ridiculous statement that it is unsafe for Emacs to
> auto-save data in Emacs core if the Wayland compositor shuts down.

There is no assurance whatsoever that you will not get that type of
reaction from a Qt developer. I had similar discussions with highly
competent maintainers of top-tier projects and it requires empathy,
politeness, patience and skillful dialogue. Not to say that this
guarantees success, but starting with the attitude of "I'm obviously
right and you are doing wrong" poses a big risk of a strong-headed
rejection.