Re: "Write a new package" culture instead of patches?

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org> writes:

> On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 11:52:18AM -0700, Stefan Kangas wrote:
>> 
>> Has anyone else thought about this?  Is it correct to say that such a
>> "package first" culture has developed?  If yes, why has it developed,
>> and is there anything we could do about it?
>
> I wonder if it's related to the way that a couple of years ago many of
> the discussions on the Emacs reddit seemed to revolve around why the
> Emacs maintainers hadn't yet fixed someone's pet bug, but nobody ever
> thought to report it to us.
Could it rather be that a "github" culture has evolved, together with
social media it makes + melpa it makes it relatively easy to fork
someone's work, change/fix what bother you and make your own package
under other name.

There was recent reddit thread where some guy posted new
search/completion framework. Reason was nothing suites him. On the
github page he went through all the different frameworks already
avialable (some of which I didn't even hear off) concluding that Helm
was the only "resonable" pne, but was so big so he prefer to write his
own.

Another factor is that maybe original author does not wish to bend
his/her package according to what someone wishes, and that someone forks
and patches the original according to own desire under different name. I
don't know, seems a little bit so. Github and flexible licensing made it
easy to fork other peoples work, social media like Reddit & Twitter made
it easy to spread the word about it and Melpa makes it easy to share (in
case of Emacs).

I don't think it has anything Emacs devs not fixing something, it is
just emerging social dev trend. Also more people are technically
skilled nowadays (millenials) and we more programmers or hobby
programmers then probably ever before.