Re: contributing to Emacs

[Po Lu]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> That was a big discussion and I've been very backlogged.  It seems to
> be around 150 messages, according to grep.  I can't read that many!
> It would take me hours.
>
> It seems to be a matter of ease of maintenance, not directly a specific
> technical point, and not an ethical issue.  I think the active maintainers
> are the best people to decide this.

No active Emacs developers, aside from Eli and me, have commented on the
technical aspects of the issue.

> 1. Why would it be a fork, rather than updating a set of changes as has
> happened with Emacs for MacOS?

That hasn't happened with Emacs for Mac OS.  The NS port is part of the
GNU Emacs distribution.

> 2. Why would a fork be a very bad thing?

Because we will soon have a proliferation of subtly incompatible
varities of Emacs.

> 3. Could you please tell me in 20 lines what the crucial issue is?
> Has someone proposed a policy that we don't install a big change
> if only one person can understand it?

Not ``if only one person can understand it'', but rather ``if there is
_currently_ only one person who understands it.''

> 4. Could we recruit Android wizards to help work on it?

Probably, if the necessity arrives.  However, the work is finished.
All that remains is to install the changes.

Thanks.