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From: Xah Lee on 15 Jul 2010 19:23
• GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency
http://xahlee.org/emacs/GNU_Emacs_dev_inefficiency.html

essay; commentary. Plain text version follows.

--------------------------------------------------
GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency

Xah Lee, 2010-07-15

Posted a bug about a problem in minor modes. bug#6611 However, it got
closed, WRONGLY! (For detail about the tech issue, see: How to Turn a
Minor Mode on/off/toggle?)

It got closed right away i suppose partly has to do with my
unforgiving nature of criticizing and run-in with some GNU emacs
developers in gnu.emacs.help and comp.emacs in the past 5 or so years.

It's quite frustrating trying to contribute to GNU Emacs. In the past
3 years, i've submitted some 50 bug reports i think by now... without
looking at the records, i think at lesat 10 or so are hard bugs that
got fixed. Some of my outspoken criticisms, had their effects, and i
suppose some emacs 23's UI changes are influenced by my criticisms.
(e.g. line-move-visual, text selection highligh by default, and i
noticed yesterday that emacs 23.2.1's doc now removed the phrase “real-
time display editor”, which was a item i criticized in Problems of
Emacs's Manual.)

I've also written to Richard Stallman a few times in private in about
2008 or 2009, about documentation improvements. With extreme
politeness and respect on my part. Without going into detail, i'm just
disenchanted by his reaction. In short, it appears to me he did not
pay much attention, and basically in the end asked me to submit
changes to him. Yeah right. The whole shebang seems to be very well
described by Ben Wing. (See: GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben
Wing.) (Richard Stallman's emails are pretty short, just a couple
terse sentences; but he does, however, whenever he got a chance, tell
his correspondents to use the term GNU/Linux, and ask them to
contribute.)

Re-writing the whole doc in a modern perspective might take me one
month full time. (e.g. 160 hours) But if it were to be done in a
public way, or submit to him, the time it takes to communicate, email,
write justifications, create diffs, etc, can easily take half a year
full time (960 hours). In the end, i'm not even sure half of the text
in the new doc would be accepted.

The GNU Emacs's bug database sucks majorly. I have problem finding all
bugs posted by me. (it's using Debbugs.) Hard to find any bug by its
search feature. They did not have a bug database, only in around 2008.
Most commercial software have a bug database system in 1990s, and most
large open source projects have one by early 2000s. (I wrote a bug
tracker in 1998, 4k lines of Perl (with CGI, MySQL), in about 2 weeks,
for a startup brainpower.com.)

Am pretty sure there are several good “FSF Free” bug databases. (see:
Comparison of issue-tracking systems) Few years ago, some may have
problem to be politically qualified to be “Free” for FSF to adopt.
However, these days there are many that FSF officially sactions as
“Free”. However, when you look at FSF, you see that even when a
software became free, they usually are still picky with lots qualms,
and typically always ends up using their OWN ones (i.e. from GNU
project), even though it is clear that it is inferior. (the GNU emacs
dev's revision control system was CVS up to ~2008. CVS has been phased
out by 2000 in vast majority of software orgs or projects. I think GNU
emacs now using SVN, while most bleeding edge orgs have switched to
git, mercurial, distributed systems. (e.g. FireFox, Google))

These are consequence of old and large orgs, with its old policies and
beaucracies. See: “Free” Software Morality, Richard Stallman, and
Paperwork Bureaucracy.

Who are the main developers of FSF software these days? Mostly, they
are either paid as FSF employee, or students still trying to break out
their craft in programing, or 40/50 years old semi-retired programers
who otherwise isn't doing anything. Those willing and able, spend time
and get decent salary in commercial corps, or went to start their own
projects or business that'd be far more rewarding financially or not
than being another name in FSF's list of contributors.

These days, FSF and Richard Stallman more serves as a figure-head and
political leader in open source movement. FSF's software, largely are
old and outdated (e.g. unix command line utils), with the exception of
perhaps GCC and GPG. If we go by actual impact of open source software
in society, i think Google's role, and other commercial orgs (such as
Apache, Perl, Python, PHP, various langs on JVM, and other project
hosters hosting any odd-end single-man projects), exceeded FSF by
~2000.

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄
From: Uday S Reddy on 16 Jul 2010 04:28
On 7/16/2010 12:23 AM, Xah Lee wrote:

>
> It's quite frustrating trying to contribute to GNU Emacs. In the past
> 3 years, i've submitted some 50 bug reports i think by now... without
> looking at the records, i think at lesat 10 or so are hard bugs that
> got fixed. Some of my outspoken criticisms, had their effects, and i
> suppose some emacs 23's UI changes are influenced by my criticisms.
> (e.g. line-move-visual, text selection highligh by default, and i
> noticed yesterday that emacs 23.2.1's doc now removed the phrase “real-
> time display editor”, which was a item i criticized in Problems of
> Emacs's Manual.)
>
> I've also written to Richard Stallman a few times in private in about
> 2008 or 2009, about documentation improvements. With extreme
> politeness and respect on my part. Without going into detail, i'm just
> disenchanted by his reaction. In short, it appears to me he did not
> pay much attention, and basically in the end asked me to submit
> changes to him. Yeah right. The whole shebang seems to be very well
> described by Ben Wing. (See: GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben
> Wing.) (Richard Stallman's emails are pretty short, just a couple
> terse sentences; but he does, however, whenever he got a chance, tell
> his correspondents to use the term GNU/Linux, and ask them to
> contribute.)
>
> Re-writing the whole doc in a modern perspective might take me one
> month full time. (e.g. 160 hours) But if it were to be done in a
> public way, or submit to him, the time it takes to communicate, email,
> write justifications, create diffs, etc, can easily take half a year
> full time (960 hours). In the end, i'm not even sure half of the text
> in the new doc would be accepted.
>
> The GNU Emacs's bug database sucks majorly. I have problem finding all
> bugs posted by me. (it's using Debbugs.) Hard to find any bug by its
> search feature. They did not have a bug database, only in around 2008.
> Most commercial software have a bug database system in 1990s, and most
> large open source projects have one by early 2000s. (I wrote a bug
> tracker in 1998, 4k lines of Perl (with CGI, MySQL), in about 2 weeks,
> for a startup brainpower.com.)
>
> Am pretty sure there are several good “FSF Free” bug databases. (see:
> Comparison of issue-tracking systems) Few years ago, some may have
> problem to be politically qualified to be “Free” for FSF to adopt.
> However, these days there are many that FSF officially sactions as
> “Free”. However, when you look at FSF, you see that even when a
> software became free, they usually are still picky with lots qualms,
> and typically always ends up using their OWN ones (i.e. from GNU
> project), even though it is clear that it is inferior. (the GNU emacs
> dev's revision control system was CVS up to ~2008. CVS has been phased
> out by 2000 in vast majority of software orgs or projects. I think GNU
> emacs now using SVN, while most bleeding edge orgs have switched to
> git, mercurial, distributed systems. (e.g. FireFox, Google))
>
> These are consequence of old and large orgs, with its old policies and
> beaucracies. See: “Free” Software Morality, Richard Stallman, and
> Paperwork Bureaucracy.
>
> Who are the main developers of FSF software these days? Mostly, they
> are either paid as FSF employee, or students still trying to break out
> their craft in programing, or 40/50 years old semi-retired programers
> who otherwise isn't doing anything. Those willing and able, spend time
> and get decent salary in commercial corps, or went to start their own
> projects or business that'd be far more rewarding financially or not
> than being another name in FSF's list of contributors.
>
> These days, FSF and Richard Stallman more serves as a figure-head and
> political leader in open source movement. FSF's software, largely are
> old and outdated (e.g. unix command line utils), with the exception of
> perhaps GCC and GPG. If we go by actual impact of open source software
> in society, i think Google's role, and other commercial orgs (such as
> Apache, Perl, Python, PHP, various langs on JVM, and other project
> hosters hosting any odd-end single-man projects), exceeded FSF by
> ~2000.
>
> Xah
> ∑ http://xahlee.org/
>
> ☄
From: Uday S Reddy on 16 Jul 2010 04:41
On 7/16/2010 12:23 AM, Xah Lee wrote:

>
> It got closed right away i suppose partly has to do with my
> unforgiving nature of criticizing and run-in with some GNU emacs
> developers in gnu.emacs.help and comp.emacs in the past 5 or so years.

I think "criticizing" is an understatement for what you do. Insulting and
abusing might be closer to the truth. You do write a lot of sense, but you
also go off on rants occasionally writing stuff that has no place in civil
conversation. I am sure that the emacs developers try to be as professional as
they can, but they would only be human if they undervalue your input because of
your writing style.

>
> Re-writing the whole doc in a modern perspective might take me one
> month full time. (e.g. 160 hours) But if it were to be done in a
> public way, or submit to him, the time it takes to communicate, email,
> write justifications, create diffs, etc, can easily take half a year
> full time (960 hours). In the end, i'm not even sure half of the text
> in the new doc would be accepted.

If you can rewrite it in a month's time, then what are you waiting for? You
can write it and publish it on your own, calling it a "Modernized Emacs
Manual". If people find it valuable and it is accurate, then I am sure Gnu
will distribute it.

> The GNU Emacs's bug database sucks majorly. I have problem finding all
> bugs posted by me. (it's using Debbugs.) Hard to find any bug by its
> search feature. They did not have a bug database, only in around 2008.
> Most commercial software have a bug database system in 1990s, and most
> large open source projects have one by early 2000s. (I wrote a bug
> tracker in 1998, 4k lines of Perl (with CGI, MySQL), in about 2 weeks,
> for a startup brainpower.com.)

I go to gmane.emacs.bugs and view it in Thunderbird. I have no problem finding
my bug reports or any one else's.

Cheers,
Uday
From: David Kastrup on 16 Jul 2010 06:33
Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy(a)cs.bham.ac.uk> writes:

> If you can rewrite it in a month's time, then what are you waiting
> for? You can write it and publish it on your own, calling it a
> "Modernized Emacs Manual". If people find it valuable and it is
> accurate, then I am sure Gnu will distribute it.

I am not. For some core products (and this includes Emacs), the FSF
requires copyright assignments in order to consider distributing them.
For something that would better be within the Emacs distribution proper,
I doubt that the FSF will consider separate distribution needed for
works not assigned to the FSF.

That does not mean that others won't distribute it (depending on its
license).

--
David Kastrup
From: Alan Mackenzie on 16 Jul 2010 12:25
In comp.emacs Xah Lee <xahlee(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------
> GNU Emacs Developement Inefficiency

> Xah Lee, 2010-07-15

> It [a bug report] got closed right away i suppose partly has to do with
> my unforgiving nature of criticizing and run-in with some GNU emacs
> developers in gnu.emacs.help and comp.emacs in the past 5 or so years.

It has to be said that that criticism has sometimes involved the use of
curse words.

> It's quite frustrating trying to contribute to GNU Emacs.

I don't find it a problem most of the time, though it does get
frustrating occasionally.

> In the past 3 years, i've submitted some 50 bug reports i think by
> now... without looking at the records, i think at lesat 10 or so are
> hard bugs that got fixed. Some of my outspoken criticisms, had their
> effects, and i suppose some emacs 23's UI changes are influenced by my
> criticisms. (e.g. line-move-visual, text selection highligh by
> default, and i noticed yesterday that emacs 23.2.1's doc now removed
> the phrase ?real- time display editor?, which was a item i criticized
> in Problems of Emacs's Manual.)

So if your bug reports are getting things moved, what's so frustrating?

> I've also written to Richard Stallman a few times in private in about
> 2008 or 2009, about documentation improvements. With extreme
> politeness and respect on my part. Without going into detail, i'm just
> disenchanted by his reaction. In short, it appears to me he did not
> pay much attention, and basically in the end asked me to submit
> changes to him. Yeah right.

Understand that RMS answers vast numbers of emails every day, and thus
can't spend more than a few seconds each on the vast majority. At least
when you email RMS you get a reply, and that reply is from him, not some
underling.

> The whole shebang seems to be very well described by Ben Wing. (See:
> GNU Emacs and Xemacs Schism, by Ben Wing.) (Richard Stallman's emails
> are pretty short, just a couple terse sentences; but he does, however,
> whenever he got a chance, tell his correspondents to use the term
> GNU/Linux, and ask them to contribute.)

Yes.

> Re-writing the whole doc in a modern perspective might take me one
> month full time. (e.g. 160 hours)

I think it would take you a great deal longer than that. But it would be
easy enough to experiment on. Chose some chapter from the Emacs or Elisp
manual, fire away and see how long it takes you.

> But if it were to be done in a public way, or submit to him, the time
> it takes to communicate, email, write justifications, create diffs,
> etc, can easily take half a year full time (960 hours). In the end, i'm
> not even sure half of the text in the new doc would be accepted.

I think your changes would not be accepted as such. Quite bluntly, your
English isn't good enough, so somebody would have to go through your
version eliminating solecisms. There's a vast gap between being able to
use English adequately to transmit your meaning and being able to write
stylish and correct English. Your English belongs to the former
category. As a matter of interest, what is your native language?

> (the GNU emacs dev's revision control system was CVS up to ~2008. CVS
> has been phased out by 2000 in vast majority of software orgs or
> projects. I think GNU emacs now using SVN, while most bleeding edge
> orgs have switched to git, mercurial, distributed systems. (e.g.
> FireFox, Google))

What's your source for "the vast majority" of projects no longer using
CVS, again as a matter of interest? Emacs uses BZR, not SVN, and has
done since the beginning of 2010.

> These are consequence of old and large orgs, with its old policies and
> beaucracies. See: ?Free? Software Morality, Richard Stallman, and
> Paperwork Bureaucracy.

Emacs uses a bug database (even if not the best) and a distributed VCS.
If the project were that old and stodgy, these two things wouldn't have
happened.

> Xah
> http://xahlee.org/

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

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