Developer contributions / was: Re: Emacs learning curve

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On Jul 12, 2010, at 9:43 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>  But I bet there is also a fair amount of
> good code sitting around out there that people are unwilling to
> contribute because of the scutwork and bikeshedding entailed in
> getting anything into Emacs, and which experienced developers could
> whip into shape quite quickly if they just took the code and said "it
> will be our pleasure".
> 
but:
On Jul 12, 2010, at 10:20 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> However, I hope you will understand that making the necessary changes
> for a contributor who is unwilling to make them by herself is not a
> good policy in the long run, because (1) it's hardly a good use of the
> limited time resources I have, and (2) we will need to do this
> forever, as the contributor doesn't want to adapt their practices to
> some minimal requirements of QA and code cleanness.  He even refuses
> to reformat his code as to facilitate the review!
> 

Often, I find that developers here insist on diagnosing and fixing more than is necessary to address an annoyance reported by the user.  Usually, they technically right and I applaud their thoroughness.  However, given limited resources, I prioritize issues reported by our users (n>1).  Hunting down some deep issues tends to be very difficult if you don't know the relevant code intimately.  So, I leave this to people who can do it.  (An example is the recent discussion about frame order management that should be left to the window manager on NS.)

A "diff" between Emacs and Aquamacs currently runs >500k lines.  While much of it may not be to Emacs code quality standards (it's not about formatting!), it represents an incremental improvement nonetheless.   All of this is GPL'ed of course.  I cannot assign every bit of code to the FSF (it was contributed by many authors), but then again, nobody ever asked or volunteered their time to adapt code for upstream integration anyway.

Further development issues:

- If the Git mirror finally allowed commits, I would at least commit some bug fixes and small improvements!  Am I the only one?

- In some cases, where I have analyzed bugs and almost present them on a plate, the bug reports still go ignored for a long time. Given limited resources, let's improve collaboration here to maximize efficiency.