Re: My resignation from Emacs development

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Richard.

On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 23:35:28 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

> Please forgive my delay in getting back to this.

No problem!

>   > The immediate problem - the use of CC Mode's symbols to mean other
>   > things - has no available compromise.

> I'm surprised by that.  I proposed more than one idea, and there was
> some discussion.  But I didn't see where it ended up.  Did that
> discussion peter out without arriving anywhere?  Was any alternative
> interface seriously considered?

What has been implemented, "remapping", is a sort of extreme version of
advice: it supersedes a symbol's function by some other function.
What's more, it is the core Emacs functions which do this, not some
wierd user setting.  CC Mode's symbol `c-mode' now sometimes means C
Mode, sometimes c-ts-mode.

I don't think this is a good technical solution for whatever problem it
was intended to solve.

I was not involved in the discussion which decided to implement this,
assuming there was such a discussion.  I have been unable to find it in
the archives, and nobody has given me a reference to it, despite it
being relevant to this thread.

The lack of available compromise is largely due to needing/wanting to
get the upcoming release released on time, without making any
significant changes to the code which might make an extra pretest
necessary.

> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).