Re: PL support

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>  address@hidden
> From: Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 02:03:58 +0300
> 
> On 11.05.2020 18:08, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> >> The frequent approach in big projects is "forwarding" bug reports to
> >> people responsible for respective piece of code.
> > 
> > Most of the code in Emacs doesn't have an "owner", so this cannot work
> > for us.  Heck, we don't even have appointed few who'd triage every
> > report quickly and efficiently (which would be one way of preventing
> > too many people from reading too many email messages).
> 
> These are the main reasons why I'm wary of adding more packages to Emacs 
> core without solid justification.

I don't think adding a few more will cause any tangible changes.  We
are also regularly retire packages to lisp/obsolete/.

> Having more core developers should be a plus for sure, but the extra 
> cognitive load for everyone else seems unavoidable either way.

Of course.  But adding packages also tends to add core developers,
albeit slowly.

> So it seems to me that the logical thing would be to try to slim it down 
> where feasible rather than simply keep growing.

Unless we are going to move a significant fraction, it won't help.  To
say nothing of the fact that ELPA packages shouldn't be abandoned,
they should still be maintained.  And moving a package to ELPA doesn't
cause someone outside of the core team to take ownership on that
package, so the overall burden will not be affected.


> > It is not easy to track issues for a large project such as ours,
> > that's true.  But let's please not represent the situation as a total
> > catastrophe: debbugs does have keywords and sub-projects, and we have
> > the debbugs package that allows to use those to read only those
> > reports in which you are interested.  Some of us do use that package.
> 
> I suppose it would help if somebody actually used the 
> keywords/sub-projects to forward bugs to other people.

Indeed.  Any volunteers?