Re: My resignation from Emacs development

[Daniel Radetsky <dradetsky@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 11:35:35PM -0600, Adam Porter wrote:
> But it is not okay for you to blame Stefan for your decision to leave.

I disagree. If he chooses to leave, and the reason for this
choice is Stefan's behavior or decisions, then blaming
Stefan seems straightforwardly informative.

I'm not as much of a veteran of this list as some of you,
and my few interactions with Stefan have been positive. So I
can't really speak to who's in the right and don't think I
should. But it's broadly better to have information about
what's going on and what decisions are being made and how
everyone feels about those decisions than to not have this
information.

Basically, if Stefan made a decisions, and this made Alan so
unhappy that he wants to leave, this is something everyone
should know. Sometimes this is the price of a decision. We
need to know the price to make informed choices.

I'm not accusing you of this specifically, but it seems like
in situations like this there's a desire to make the
situation black and white. Either Stefan made a bad decision
which ought to be reversed, and the fact that it is not
being reversed would justify Alan leaving, or Alan is being
unreasonable and thus his decision to leave is a foregone
conclusion being unfairly blamed on Stefan. Thus if we don't
want to reverse Stefan's decision, we must believe that Alan
is being unreasonable.

But it's also possible that e.g. Stefan made a good decision
in the big picture, but this was locally problematic for
Alan. And even though we prefer Stefan's good decision, we
prefer a worse decision with the benefit of Alan's continued
contribution than the alternative. Or maybe not, but this is
why we want to surface the costs of decisions. It's better
than pretending that hard decisions don't need to be made,
and that the true costs of those decisions are just somebody
being unreasonable and thus not worth counting on the "cost"
side of the ledger.

If Alan isn't happy with Stefan's decision then even if we
think it was overall a good decision, this doesn't mean we
have to be unhappy with Alan. We can just ask ourselves if
the whole thing is worth it. Or rather, the rest of you can
ask it; I don't have an opinion on the specifics.

--dmr