Re: Attitude (was: Proposal: new default bindings for winner and windmove)

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Eli.

On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 08:16:14 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:38:35 +0000
> > Cc: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>,
> >  Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>

> > Hello, Stefan.

> (Not really a "hello", is it?)

Er, yes it is.  I'm recognising the personality and individuality of
whoever I'm addressing, in this case Stefan.

> > Talking about minor proposals, I got the following message in
> > *Async-native-compile-log*  in one of my development branches:

> > /home/acm/cc-mode.hg/cc-fonts.el: Error Wrong type argument: listp, #[(form) (`(cdr (backquote-process ,form))) nil]

> > , which clearly has to do with your "minor proposal" to introduce a new
> > type for interpreted functions.  I really can't be bothered at the moment
> > to go through all the work of tracking this down, but would be grateful
> > nevertheless if you would fix it.

> > By the way, did you get any approval for this change from the current
> > maintainers, or did you just go ahead and commit it anyway?  I seem to
> > remember you sweeping aside and ignoring my "disproportionately intense
> > fire" on this matter, implying it would cause nobody extra work.

> Alan, please drop this immature attitude.  It's unbecoming.

Please note, I was responding to an unnecessary personal attack from
Stefan.

> I have no idea what change you are talking about (as you "cannot be
> bothered" to point it out, evidently), ....

The change was

commit f2bccae22bd47a2e7e0937b78ea06131711b935a
Author: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
Date:   Mon Mar 11 16:12:26 2024 -0400

    Use a dedicated type to represent interpreted-function values

We discussed this change, while it was still a proposal, at some length
in the emacs-devel thread starting with Subject: Distinguishing `consp`
and `functionp`; From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>; Date:
Thu, 25 Jan 2024 18:15:48 -0500.  You probably remember me asking Stefan
repeatedly to justify this proposal and getting no satisfactory answers.
You even asked him yourself.  Richard pronounced emphatically against the
change, describing it as "perverse".  There was certainly no general
consensus in the list that the change would be a good thing.

Nevertheless, Stefan committed the above change on March 11.  My question
to Stefan was, did he have any approval to do so?  Let me ask you - did
you approve the change and communicate that to Stefan before his commit?
If not, did Stefan K., the only other maintainer at the time?

> .... and I cannot try to reproduce it myself (since you didn't tell
> how) or examine the backtrace (since you haven't posted one), but in
> general, this is development, and mistakes whether silly or serious, do
> happen.  When mistakes do happen, we don't castigate our fellow
> developers, certainly not those with Stefan's record, for any
> unintended consequences of their work.

In the above thread, I pointed out to Stefan that the proposed change
would necessarily cause extra work and bugs, and this is precisely what
has happened, what I described in my last post.  Stefan's response was to
mock me, without answering the point.

> Instead, we respectfully describe the problems with all the relevant
> details and discuss how to fix the problems.

The problem I encountered involved Stefan's "perverse" commit of March
11.  It contained #[(form) (`(cdr (backquote-process ,form))) nil], one
of the new interpreted forms.  Without that commit, the bug could not
have happened.  Forgive me for getting somewhat angry about this.

> IOW, this is a cooperative community effort of developing software,
> and I respectfully demand that each one of us behaves accordingly.

As I see it, the project is under the guidance and direction of you and
the other maintainers.  Richard has special privileges, as a moderate
person with an extremely high ability to discern the Right Thing, as well
as being the originator of Emacs.  In technical matters, I respect and
follow your direction, despite not always agreeing with it.  Nearly all
other contributers do the same.

But Stefan M. doesn't appear to fit this model.  He makes changes to the
code base as he sees fit, regardless of any consensus in the project, or
direction from you or the other maintainers.  Unlike you and Richard,
Stefan _doesn't_ have the ability to know the Right Thing, isn't good at
writing documentation, and isn't always as forthcoming in email exchanges
as one would expect from a senior contributor.

> Anyone who misbehaves on my watch will be kindly asked to stop, or
> else.

Stefan would appear to have special privileges in the Emacs project.
Why?

> I now expect you to apologize and to post the details of the problem
> (as a separate bug report).

Yes, I'm sorry about all this happening.  I'll open a bug report,
probably committing the current (ugly) state of my development branch
where it happened to a git branch under scratch.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).