Re: Proposal for an emacs-humanities mailing list

[Leo Vivier <zaeph@zaeph.net>]

Hi there,

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> I don't think we need to assume that.  Emacs's extensibility and
>> customizability mean that there are plenty of beneficial suggestions
>> that users can make to each other without getting active core
>> developers involved.  And when a topic does warrant the attention of a
>> maintainer, then someone from the new list can come find one (perhaps
>> by posting on Emacs Devel if appropriate).
>
> Do you really think this will work?  I don't, FWIW.  How can a group
> of people not involved with development answer non-trivial questions,
> suggest reporting useful bugs and feature requests etc.?  Even
> help-gnu-emacs would not be the same without several developers
> dwelling there.  Posting to emacs-devel is a slippery path to making
> this new list a branch of the existing ones, something that this
> initiative wants explicitly to avoid.  I'm probably missing something
> here.

I share Eli’s position on the matter.  As interesting as the underlying
project might be, I believe it’s a little premature to create a new
list, especially if we’re not articulating it with anything else.

Getting more people to use Free software within the academe is a cause
close to my heart, and many people seem to be sharing this sentiment in
the wake of the EmacsConf 2020.  I’ve scheduled a meeting with some of
the interested parties to start the discussion and formulate next-steps
with the hope that we might spearhead the federation of that community
in 2021.  In the meantime, I would invite people who are interested in
the project to bide their time; we’ll publicise soon enough.

Best,

-- 
Leo Vivier
Freelance Software Engineer
Website: www.leovivier.com | Blog: www.zaeph.net