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My resignation from Emacs development
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
My resignation from Emacs development |
Date: |
Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:13:18 +0000 |
Hello, Emacs.
I'm resigning my position as Emacs contributor.
The immediate reason is that, as maintainer of CC Mode, CC Mode's
symbols, its names, were taken by Emacs and used for other purposes
without informing me, much less consulting me. That makes my position as
CC Mode maintainer here untenable.
Eli Zaretskii and I have had extensive discussions, both in public and in
private email, over the last week or so, but we have been unable to reach
any satisfactory compromise solution.
Names are important. They have power. To take somebody's/somthing's
name and misuse it is an exercise of aggression. Try using "Emacs" or
even "free software" to mean something different, and see just how
quickly you would hear back from Richard Stallman. This misuse of CC
Mode's "trademarks", the symbols `c-mode', `c++-mode', and perhaps
`c-or-c++-mode', is just such an act of aggression.
These symbols have been appropriated by Emacs to mean "the current
preferred mode for C", etc., rather than C Mode, C++ Mode etc. In
certain circumstances, in particular, in Local Variables: sections and
auto-mode-alist, there is now no longer any way unambiguously to specify
C Mode or C++ Mode. Up till recently ("\\.myc\\'" . c-mode) in
auto-mode-alist meant C Mode, and would have had the effect of
auto-loading CC Mode, if needed, and running C Mode.
The change took place in the commit for bug#69191 "New var
`major-mode-remap-defaults`, for packages". It sounds so innocent, but
is an extremely bad solution for whatever problem (unspecified in the
commit message) it was intended to solve. A major mode using it changes
the interfaces of other libraries in an uncontrolled way. This is not
good software engineering.
This bug was raised and committed by Stefan Monnier. Despite the fact
that the bug fix directly impinged upon CC Mode, and there was even a
change to cc-mode.el in the patch, he failed even to inform me. The only
two modes substantially affected by this change were ruby-mode and CC
Mode, and it is clear that Dmitry Gutov, maintainer of ruby-mode, was
aware of the change. Had I known of this proposal, I would certainly
have objected to it. Stefan is intelligent enough to have realised this,
and maybe his avoidance of open discussion was motivated by this.
Bug#69191 was a big change. In Emacs, we have a convention whereby big
changes are discussed openly on emacs-devel and a consensus reached
before the change is made. Stefan Monnier has regularly violated this
convention, possibly believing that his ideas for Emacs are so good as to
be beyond question. Any attempt to question his ideas is likely to be
met by evasive non-answers, if any response at all is forthcoming. I
could give several paragraphs worth of justification for these
assertions, but I think everybody here knows I am right.
In Emacs there is also a convention of treating eachother with respect on
the mailing lists. Sadly this convention is superficial, and seems only
to mean things like not using swear words. The truly contemptuous
communication style, this evasive non-answering, seems to be regarded as
acceptable. I suggest that this change.
Stefan's habit of making big changes in Emacs without seeking consensus
is at the heart of why I am resigning. These changes have caused Emacs a
lot of damage over the years and have caused other contributors,
including me, extra work and difficulty. Stefan is a Jekyll-and-Hyde
character. On the one hand, he's a very capable hacker, and is always
ready to help others with technical questions. On the other hand, as
mentioned, he is contemptuous of the Emacs conventions, and unlike
Richard and Eli, does not have the gift of knowing what the Right Thing
is.
I strongly recommend that Stefan somehow be reigned in and required to
observe Emacs's conventions about open discussion and courteous
communication. As I mentioned, his violations of these are at the core
of why I feel unable to continue contributing to Emacs.
I will shortly be unsubscribing from emacs-devel. I intend to carry on
maintaining stand alone CC Mode, and I'm prepared to deal with any CC
Mode issues which arise in Emacs. Please post these to
bug-cc-mode@gnu.org.
It just remains to say that my respect for Eli and the other maintainers
remains undiminished, and that I wish all of them and the Emacs project
all success in the future.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
Re: My resignation from Emacs development, Alfred M. Szmidt, 2024/11/20
Re: My resignation from Emacs development, tomas, 2024/11/20