Re: My resignation from Emacs development

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Madhu <enometh@meer.net>
>> Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:54:01 +0530
>>
>> The correct response to these complaints would be if Eli and the
>> maintainers would reign in Stefan and address the genuine concerns
>> rather than gerrymandering on with the present course.
>>
>> This again purposely misses the point and does not address the isssue
>> raised by the resignation. That there are problems with Stefans
>> intentions which are not as stated which are of concern to emacs
>> development as a whole, these are being swept under the floor. There are
>> repeated concerns that the way Stefan is leading development us
>> destroying the value of core which RMS brought to us from the 70s. This
>> is being set aside through bulldozering narrative.
>
> When we see such problems, they are _never_ swept under the carpet.
> On the contrary, the reaction is usually immediate and quite harsh,
> including (but not limited to) reverting the offending changes in a
> non-negotiable way.
>
> The reason this didn't happen with Stefan Monnier is that at least I
> don't see any particular problem of this kind in what Stefan does (and
> did during the decades of his very active involvement in the project).
> The Emacs model of development is that we completely trust leading
> contributors to install changes without discussing them.  This trust
> works well and keeps our development moving forward very fast,
> although sometimes there are good-faith mistakes, which then require
> discussions a-posteriori, and sometimes (rarely) end up with changes
> being reverted or radically modified.  All of the leading
> contributors, including yours truly, have sometimes, rarely, made such
> mistakes.  Stefan's record is not different in this regard from any
> other's.  The changes he installed in March indeed should have been
> discussed more, but I don't expect us rejecting them as result.
> Moreover, Alan himself made such a mistake when he installed his
> cc-mode.el change back in May, the change which led to bug#74339, and
> eventually to this sad result (because Alan staunchly opposed to
> modifying his change from back then, even though the modifications
> proposed to him would not affect the effect of his change in any way).
>
> So there's nothing here that requires any "reigning in", just the
> normal practice of Emacs development, which hasn't changed in decades,
> because we think it fits well the way this community is structured,
> and the nature and the vast span of expertise needed to develop an
> maintain Emacs.
>
> I cannot speak for Stefan Kangas and Andrea, but I'd be very surprised
> if they didn't agree with what I say above.  We definitely don't agree
> that the many changes developed and installed by Stefan are
> "destroying the value of core which RMS brought to us from the 70s."
> Quite the opposite.
>
> So no, we are not "gerrymandering", and the reason we don't even
> consider "reigning in" Stefan is because we see absolutely no problems
> with his conduct, certainly no malice.  And while it is easy to
> bad-mouth our ways of leading the project "from the fences" by people
> who are not really involved with the day in and day out hard work on
> helping this community move forward, and never contributed anything
> significant to that movement, the truth is very far from these claims.
> You and Alfred, and even Po Lu, are well advised to tone down your
> claims, and exercise much more humility when you post such vicious
> personal attacks on Stefan and others.

In case there is any doubt, I very much agree with everything that Eli
writes here.