Re: Representation of the Emacs userbase on emacs-devel

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 03.09.2021 15:26, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> We are, I hope, interested mainly in making Emacs evolve and adapt to
> the changing times and preferences.  I consider the way of introducing
> changes as optional first to be a better way towards that goal,
> including the goal to change the defaults.  And I explained in so many
> words why and how.  How is that side-stepping the issue at hand?

The goals of having Emacs "evolve and adapt" and having it stay the same 
are inherently at odds.

> Show me a project where things are different, where the lead
> developers cannot say "I don't like" (with arguments, which you forget
> to mention, or prefer to dismiss or disregard, but they are still
> there), and that's it.  This is how Free Software projects are being
> developed, at least IME.  Emacs is not an outlier, it's right there in
> the mainstream.

You might as well have said "show me a project where the leaders don't 
make decisions".

So what? We can still question the logic in said decisions.

> > > IME, at least on
> > > my daytime job, source code produced by people these days with popular
> > > IDEs (not Emacs) includes TABs.
> >
> > Does it include tabs in the same fashion as what is produced by Emacs?
> > Which actually mixes tabs and spaces.
>
> Why does it matter?  If we'd make the default use only TABs, would you
> agree then?

You would not be able to -- it would be just as breaking, and it would 
require even more changes, including various major modes. Like 
synchronizing tab-width and the *-indent-level variables.

But it would make more sense, at least.

It does matter if you are at all interested in the current popular 
practices around tabs vs spaces (meaning being interested in what people 
ultimately want: Emacs users generally don't get to choose the current 
project style at the workplace).

When we look at the polls about indentation style preference (where 
"tabs" can be as high as ~30% for certain languages), they don't prefer 
the kind of tab-based indentation that Emacs does. Which really means we 
only satisfy some tiny fraction of the users OOTB in any language.