Re: PL support

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 09.05.2020 22:49, João Távora wrote:
> On Sat, May 9, 2020 at 8:12 PM Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Our bug tracker and development workflow has no solutions to this
> > problem: everybody has to read every bug report and every commit message.
>
> This is good.  I for one would like to spend a lot less time on Github.

You might be happy with the reduced volume of bug report reaching you 
after such a move.

Maybe less happy later to see people complaining about some problems in 
Eglot on Twitter, Reddit, their blogs, etc. And yet never bothering to 
'M-x report-emacs-bug' them, for whatever reasons. I wonder what your 
choice in such a situation is going to be: ignore the problems (not 
reported = not a bug), or go out anyway and search for such negative 
feedback and ask people to "please M-x report-emacs-bug already". 
Because we have had been doing a lot of the latter.

In any case, if you like debbugs, you could just move Eglot's 
development to GNU ELPA.

> > Making concerted changes could become easier sometimes, but it would
> > also become easier to break backward compatibility.
>
> Really? Am I breaking backward compatibility all the time in Emacs?

Not really. But that's the only conceptual advantage I could see: 
changing things in tandem. To *not* break things, at least for me, 
packages have to be considered separately... and then having them in the 
same repo is not so big an advantage.

In any case, it's not my main demotivator. Increased debbugs and 
emacs-diffs traffic is. I'd rather much work on code that sorting 
through email not related to me. There is nothing at all personal in this.

> Don't we have tests? Don't we have a (crude) namespacing system
> for those libraries?  Don't we have Eli, the ever-vigilant? And Stefan
> and everybody else?  And weren't you the one the one who told me
> not to worry about that when refactoring Flymake?

Eli who hasn't found time to try out Eglot yet. Same for Stefan, I imagine.

Going back to xref and project.el, for instance, it wouldn't be 
sufficient to submit a patch and, in the explanation, assume my 
familiarity with Eglot's code. So I kind of doubt it will help you a lot.

> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-08/msg00415.html

Yup, it was a big rewrite, and Flymake was not used as much as e.g. 
Eldoc is. I'm not saying you can never break backward compatibility, 
just that you *usually* cannot break it.

> > and making a change in Emacs separately is a good reminder of that separation.
>
> Really, are you telling me this?  Do you really think I (and other
> developers) need
> to be actively annoyed to be reminded of that? A file isn't enough separation?
> That's not the point of GNU ELPA at all.

Um, of course not. GNU ELPA is our repository of recommended packages.