Re: My resignation from Emacs development

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Madhu <enometh@meer.net>
> Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:54:01 +0530
> 
> * Adam Porter <169c6564-4722-4338-a049-5f8f3ce69394@alphapapa.net> :
> Wrote on Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:35:35 -0600:
> 
> > But it is not okay for you to blame Stefan for your decision to leave.
> >  As you know, in the past he served as the Emacs maintainer, and now he
> > remains a prominent contributor, and a maintainer of some parts of
> > Emacs, but not of the overall project.  So if you can't abide some
> > technical decisions that have been made by Stefan M., you ought to take
> > them up with Eli, Andrea, and Stefan K.  And if they disagree with you
> > and won't overturn those decisions, and you decide to leave, you ought
> > to ascribe that responsibility simply and honestly, not by publicly
> > defaming Stefan M. like this.  It does not behoove you, nor the GNU
> > Emacs project, to act this way.
> 
> The correct response to these complaints would be if Eli and the
> maintainers would reign in Stefan and address the genuine concerns
> rather than gerrymandering on with the present course.
> 
> This again purposely misses the point and does not address the isssue
> raised by the resignation. That there are problems with Stefans
> intentions which are not as stated which are of concern to emacs
> development as a whole, these are being swept under the floor. There are
> repeated concerns that the way Stefan is leading development us
> destroying the value of core which RMS brought to us from the 70s. This
> is being set aside through bulldozering narrative.

When we see such problems, they are _never_ swept under the carpet.
On the contrary, the reaction is usually immediate and quite harsh,
including (but not limited to) reverting the offending changes in a
non-negotiable way.

The reason this didn't happen with Stefan Monnier is that at least I
don't see any particular problem of this kind in what Stefan does (and
did during the decades of his very active involvement in the project).
The Emacs model of development is that we completely trust leading
contributors to install changes without discussing them.  This trust
works well and keeps our development moving forward very fast,
although sometimes there are good-faith mistakes, which then require
discussions a-posteriori, and sometimes (rarely) end up with changes
being reverted or radically modified.  All of the leading
contributors, including yours truly, have sometimes, rarely, made such
mistakes.  Stefan's record is not different in this regard from any
other's.  The changes he installed in March indeed should have been
discussed more, but I don't expect us rejecting them as result.
Moreover, Alan himself made such a mistake when he installed his
cc-mode.el change back in May, the change which led to bug#74339, and
eventually to this sad result (because Alan staunchly opposed to
modifying his change from back then, even though the modifications
proposed to him would not affect the effect of his change in any way).

So there's nothing here that requires any "reigning in", just the
normal practice of Emacs development, which hasn't changed in decades,
because we think it fits well the way this community is structured,
and the nature and the vast span of expertise needed to develop an
maintain Emacs.

I cannot speak for Stefan Kangas and Andrea, but I'd be very surprised
if they didn't agree with what I say above.  We definitely don't agree
that the many changes developed and installed by Stefan are
"destroying the value of core which RMS brought to us from the 70s."
Quite the opposite.

So no, we are not "gerrymandering", and the reason we don't even
consider "reigning in" Stefan is because we see absolutely no problems
with his conduct, certainly no malice.  And while it is easy to
bad-mouth our ways of leading the project "from the fences" by people
who are not really involved with the day in and day out hard work on
helping this community move forward, and never contributed anything
significant to that movement, the truth is very far from these claims.
You and Alfred, and even Po Lu, are well advised to tone down your
claims, and exercise much more humility when you post such vicious
personal attacks on Stefan and others.