Re: Bug #25608 and the comment-cache branch

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2017 22:00:45 +0000
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> 
> But I need your acceptance of comment-cache to go any further.  It has
> taken a lot of my time to develop, and I am still hopeful of merging it
> into master.  If there is a sound technical reason why it should be
> abandoned, that is fair enough.  If it is rejected without such a
> reason, I will need to reconsider my relationship with Emacs.  I am
> currently working (or "working") on several ambitious changes in Emacs.
> One of them is restructuring the byte compiler so that error and warning
> messages get the correct line number (bug #22288, etc.).  If there is
> the prospect of these being rejected without good reason, I am not
> willing to take the risk of wasting my time on them.  I would restrict
> my participation in Emacs to CC Mode and simple changes in the non-C
> part of Emacs which can be done in at most a very few hours.

Alan,

I hear you, and I'm sorry that you feel such frustration over your
efforts whose results might not end up in the Emacs sources.  Please
understand my position: I'm not an expert on the underlying issues,
neither syntax.c in general, nor syntax-ppss, and not the particular
application of these to CC Mode.  So when two of our best experts on
these issues unanimously disagree with your proposal, I cannot dismiss
their opinions and approve the merge.  Their arguments are technical
and sound, even though they are about the general principles of your
design and not about specific details of your implementation.  But
that doesn't make their arguments invalid or less sound.

So please don't perceive this as "rejection without sound technical
reasons".

As for your other work on changes in Emacs: I see no reasons to
believe their review or prospects of acceptance will be related to the
present issue in any way.  They will be treated completely
independently of this one.

I can understand your fears of having those other changes rejected
because of some aspect of the design or the implementation.  I had my
share of that when I worked on the bidi display engine.  I can tell
what I did to lower the probability of such an outcome: when I made
major design decisions, I published them here and asked for (and
received) comments.  May I suggest that you try that technique as
well?  Doing that will IME go a long way towards identifying the
problematic issues long before they are cast in written and debugged
code, and thus allow you to avoid unnecessary refactoring and grief.

Hoping to see many of your patches in Emacs in the years to come.

TIA