Re: Sad tweet

[Kévin Le Gouguec]

(Took the liberty of CC'ing Jonas to make sure he can correct any
mischaracterization, and to show our support, such as it is)

bandali@gnu.org writes:

> Ypo writes:
>
>> I've read this:
>>
>> "Contributing to Emacs is so frustrating. It's not worth it for minor
>> things and if I cannot get some experience and confidence with minor
>> things, then I likely won't ever make major contributions."
>> https://twitter.com/magit_emacs/status/1396536686570610697?s=19
>
> Do you know if there is any more context around that?  Did Jonas mention
> any specific pain points around contributing to Emacs and/or concrete
> things that he thinks could be improved?  Last time I'd seen him post on
> emacs-devel it seemed like things were going fairly smoothly with his
> work on adding transient to Emacs(?).

Given the timing, I'd hazard that this stems from bug#48592 (plus a few
more past attempts that Jonas deems similarly fruitless, I assume).

FWIW, to bounce off Amin's reply: Jonas, the patience you demonstrated
in order to get transient in Emacs core was nothing short of saintly,
and I for one am grateful for your perseverance.

I understand how Emacs's development process can feel frustrating,
especially in Jonas's position as maintainer of a popular package like
Magit:

1. on the one hand, each and every attempt at contributing is met with
   varying degrees of skepticism and defiance, on the premise that you
   might e.g. break other people's code, disrupt other people's
   workflow…

2. on the other hand, upstream sometimes adds major features which
   impact your package, and you wake up to lots of disgruntled users
   expecting you to fix something you never saw coming; cf. :extend t,
   the tentative binding for C-x g…

I don't necessarily view 1 nor 2 as inherently problematic: for 1, we're
lucky to have maintainers looking out for breakage, although the line
between "healthy conservatism" and "clinical sclerosis" is blurry; for
2, users of the development branch or the latest release should expect
some measure of breakage in third-party packages.

As a user, watching from the sidelines, the process "works": third-party
additions slowly make their way upstream after some review and a
generous coating of backward-compatibility/accessibility changes; on the
flip side, bleeding-edge users warn third-party maintainers of upcoming
changes which can then be amended before they make it into a release.

Even so, as a third-party maintainer, I assume the combination of 1 and
2 feels like a "power imbalance": one party makes the other's life
consistently harder.

So, once more with feeling: thank you Jonas for your patience and your
perserverance 🙏


Disclaimer: I'm very much just a user, whose free time is mostly gobbled
up catching up with the mailing lists.  This reply is my interpretation
of what I observe and may not be representative of anybody else's
feelings on the subject.