Re: New maintainer

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > My OS X story for Emacs is mostly this: Give Mitsuharu Yamamoto
  > whatever help he needs. His "Mac port" variant of Emacs is all I
  > could ask for in terms of OS X support right now. I'd like to see
  > it modernized under Cocoa, if at all possible, or promoted to a
  > build flavor in the master branch.

That would go against the goals of the GNU Project, both practically
and in principle.  It would be a very strong commitment to a system
that exemplifies the injustice we aim to get rid of.  It would be
utterly backwards.

  > I'm not talking about upheaval here, just equal footing,

It would be wrong and harmful to give MacOS an "equal footing".
Our goal is to replace nonfree systems (and nonfree software in
general), not to enhance them.

We measure improvement of GNU Emacs in terms of what it can do as part
of the GNU system.  What happens on MacOS or Windows does not count.

See the section "Platforms to Support", in Information for Maintainers
of GNU Software.

We do include support for MacOS and Windows, to the extent people
develop such support and it isn't a problem to include; but we reject
any obligation to support them.  Making that an obligation would
legitimize those systems -- and go against our goal, which is to beat
them -- and divert effort to something that doesn't count.

If the Emacs maintainers rejected features that work only on GNU-like
systems, saying "You must add support for Windows and MacOS before we
can install this," that would pressure our contributors to use
proprietary systems (it is unethical even to suggest people use
them!).  That requirement would hold back contribution from developers
that don't use them.  It would thus impede the improvement of GNU
Emacs (which means, making it function better in GNU).

Thus, it is unacceptable to require Windows or MacOS support before
installing contributions.  A contribution only HAS to work on GNU (but
it should be conditionalized so it does not break Emacs on the other
platforms it doesn't support), but we should try to keep it working on
*BSD since that is usually easy.  As for Windows and MacOS support, we
can integrate that if and when someone provides it.

There is nothing wrong with an Emacs maintainer's writing code to
support for Windows or MacOS.  However, if the maintainers have
limited time for Emacs, spending much time supporting secondary
platforms could leave the Emacs maintainers' main job starved for
time.  That would be a practical problem, if it happens.  Perhaps
it won't happen.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.