Re: AW: Fwd: CEDET sync

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> writes:

> Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> The diversity hits the users too. As I have said I recently had a
>> discussion with a long term GNU/Linux user who jump off to Windows 7
>> because the quality of the mid-level library was too low on
>> GNU/Linux.  The key factor was the diversity (too many libraries
>> doing the same thing) which he thought creates this problem.
>>
>> I think solving this is urgent - and very, very difficult.
>
> Common sense.

Too common.

> The main issue is that as soon as you suggest concentrating resources
> in any shape or form then the usual suspects jump out and accuse you
> of being anti Freedom and choice.

That's a rant not supported by any facts regarding the Emacs/XEmacs
situation as far as I am concerned.  I've never seen such behavior from
XEmacs developers.  Complaints from their side focus about reinvention
of the wheel and (in their view) unnecessary incompatibilities.  With
regard to XEmacs ports, my impression is that they take what they can
get and do the rest themselves given sufficient resources.  That's one
point of their package system source tree.

The results are not always convincing, but that is not harming Emacs
development.

Most current XEmacs developers would not be interested in working on
Emacs anyway.  The main cost of diversity comes not by "usual suspects
jumping out" but rather by developers focused on Emacs, but investing
research and development time in order to provide XEmacs compatibility.
Out of a personal feeling of responsibility.

At times that may not be the most prudent course for the interest of
their own usage patterns, but then even on Emacs we often have the
situation that the active developer of some package is not actually
among its "power users": a certain degree of unselfishness seems hard to
suppress reliably.

> Its madness.
>
> Support the main Emacs distribution and let the tiny minority who want
> their own little niche port it over if necessary.

It is not exactly a "little niche port", and they do an impressive job
doing exactly that given their numbers.

-- 
David Kastrup