Re: EMACS=t Joy and Happiness

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 05/24/2018 07:25 PM, Van L wrote:
> Ask them for what Tesla or Uber or Facebook or Google use


I just checked the first company mentioned on your list (Tesla) and it 
is posting want-ads that ask for Red Hat expertise. Unfortunately I 
can't disclose what I privately know about Tesla, but suffice it to say 
that like most other successful companies they use a wide variety of 
systems in their work, and not all of these systems are the very latest 
version of everything.


> I can understand the excuse for long-term-support system contracts but not for the poster’s student environment.
>
> You refer to lazy privileged people


I'm afraid there's a misunderstanding here. At UCLA we have a wide 
variety of systems running many different OSes. Servers at UCLA run many 
operating systems; it's quite a gamut, as we have a lot of departments 
and research groups, most of which focus on areas other than computer 
science and who have a lot of software of varying quality that they 
don't necessarily have time or budget to upgrade or maintain 
extensively. The courses I teach are assigned to a batch of RHEL 7 
servers that support many different courses, not just mine. I do not 
specify or maintain the server OSes; that's a responsibility of the 
operations staff of the School of Engineering, and they're busy people 
who do not report to me.

To help keep my course material up-to-date I install copies of the 
latest released versions of Emacs (currently 25.3), Bash (currently 
4.4.19), and many other free software programs. (I don't overwrite 
/usr/bin of course; I install into a separate directory that students 
put into their PATH settings.) So it'll be little trouble to me or my 
students if Emacs requires Bash 4.4 or later. When I mentioned RHEL 7, I 
wasn't simply talking about my personal situation; I was observing that 
requiring Bash 4.4 would be a hassle for people installing newer Emacs 
versions onto Red Hat servers, as it would require these people to also 
install newer Bash versions. If it's important for Emacs to require Bash 
4.4 of course Emacs can do so; still, I expect that the overall hassle 
to Emacs users of requiring Bash 4.4 still outweighs the relatively 
minor technical benefit in question. Sorry, but that's how things often 
work in production software.

With all this in mind you might want to rethink your comments that among 
other things seem to imply that the staff at UCLA consists of "lazy 
privileged people".