On Tue, Jan 05, 2021 at 10:48:18AM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Martin.
> 
> On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 18:21:19 +0100, martin rudalics wrote:
> >  > Forgive me if I become uncustomarily blunt and personal, but it seems you
> >  > are determined to find the worst possible interpretation of everything,
> >  > and your replies to so many posts take on an unusually negative tone.
> 
> > Forgive me Alan but
> 
> >  > The old "behaviour" seems to be an ad hoc unsystematic mess, not worthy
> >  > even of being called a behaviour.
> 
> > has a rather negative tone too.
> 
> It does, but it's about a thing, not a person's actions.  Does it
> disturb anybody?  Does it disturb you?  That's a genuine question.  If
> so, I will be more careful to avoid repeating the disturbance in the
> future.

This is from the peanut gallery, and from many a past experience.

Take into account that whoever is proposing a change has gone
through a possibly taxing experience and has had to muster quite
a bit of enthusiasm to follow through.

So criticising his/her baby might land, on the other side as a
critique of the person him/herself.

That doesn't mean, of course, that critique is impossible: on the
contrary, that's the only way we (people and things) get better.

So... critique away! But use as much empathy in that as you
can summon.

And, on the original topic, just to illustrate my background
a bit: I'm one of those who appreciate infinitely Emacs' relative
stability.

As a comparison: I've just had a Firefox update. The way the URL
bar works changed subtly -- a double-click doesn't leave the URL
selected anymore (among other things too subtle to put a name on,
but too annoying to just ignore).

The expletives I wrote on my personal diary are NSFW. I was, and
still am, in rage. Why do they have to change every little thing,
just because? This is the contrary of user-empowering. CADT [1],
and so on ad so forth.

But this way of seeing things is just there, it is my first
impression, it is important to understand things. But I feel the
duty to distill it in a constructive way before throwing it at
any other human being.

It's a difficlut balance, but I think it's worth it. We humans
are a messy bunch, it seems :)

Cheers

[1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

 - t