Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Eli.

I haven't really been following this thread, but one tangential thing in
it jumped out at me:

On Sat, Dec 03, 2016 at 02:47:07PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Daniel Colascione <address@hidden>
> > Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
> > Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2016 01:34:42 -0800

[ .... ]

> > What evidence would convince you that you were incorrect?

> That's easy: a significant increase in the number of active developers
> working on the C level.

I have made quite a lot of changes at the C level, but I'm not really a
"core C level" developer.

However, it feels that an unusually high proportion of C level changes I
have hacked or proposed have been rejected.  ("Unusual" when compared to
lisp level changes.)  Examples include:

(i) Changing the method of syntax.c scanning backwards over comments.  My
changes found their way into branch comment-cache in 2016-03.  Despite
this change having been extensively discussed in emacs-devel, and sort of
"approved", the final patch was never considered on its merits.  The
ostensible reason was that it used a cache which wasn't the syntax-ppss
cache.

(ii) Around 2015-11-17, I proposed a patch to fix bug #21869 and bug
#21333, with top line of the commit message being "Invoke
window-size-change-functions after changing echo area height.".  The
problem here was that window-size-change-functions was sometimes being
called twice.  You rejected my patch because you were "not keen" on
changing the order of calls in the display engine because we "didn't
fully understand what was going on".  Again, I don't think this proposed
patch was really considered on its merits.

(iii) Earlier this year, we were having problems because some primitives
were not calling before-change-functions and after-change-functions the
way we might wish.  My offer to analyse the code and amend it so that all
primitives would call b-c-f and a-c-f predictably was declined, the
proviso being (if I remember correctly) "unless somebody writes a solid
suite of unit tests".  At the time of this rejection, I'd already
invested some time on the analysis.

It would be unfair not to mention that a lot of changes I've proposed at
the C level, and hacked, have been accepted.  Yet, at the same time, when
I now consider tackling problems which need fixing at the C level, I feel
a doubt in my mind that any proposed fix would be properly considered,
and I weigh up this possibility before committing myself to spending any
time on it.

In short, I feel discouraged from working at the C level because of the
above.  I might not be the only developer who feels this.

[ .... ]

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).