Re: Bug #25608 and the comment-cache branch

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Eli.

On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 22:47:24 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2017 20:24:18 +0000
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>

> > I would like to merge comment-cache into master, finally fixing this bug
> > once and for all.  What do you say, Eli?

> I say there's too much resistance to doing that from people whose
> opinions I respect and trust.  Each time this issue comes up, I see
> that resistance being expressed again.

Primarily from Stefan.  The issue was discussed just a few weeks ago,
and the resistance expressed was philosophical rather than practical:
for example, it would be nice if the solution was less complicated, or
it would be nice if it also cached the rest of the syntax mechanism.

That criticism did not identify concrete difficulties which
comment-cache might cause.  (I do not deny there might be such
difficulties, but they can surely be fixed, whatever they turn out to
be.)  There was no argument with comment-cache's algorithms, no
non-vague suggestions as to how they might be improved.  In fact the
only technical part of the discussion concerned comment-cache's speed.

The identified resistance was expressed in a form which didn't give me
feedback as to how to make improvements.

> I hope it's possible to find some kind of compromise or a different
> solution that leaves people less unhappy.

Compromise with what?  There is no alternative solution on the table at
the moment.  I would really love to understand what, in concrete terms,
the objections to comment-cache are.

And in the meantime, it's me that has to keep fielding all these paren
in column zero bugs, and some of them (like Paul's bug from last March)
require strenuous debugging.  It's me that has to keep apologising for
this deficiency in Emacs to those raising the bugs.

None of this is fun.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).