Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:07:12 -0500
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
> Cc: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
> > > This is a typical modern open-source project.  It's not even a
> > > particularly large one -- no more than a dozen core devs, 58
> > > developers total.
> > 
> > A striking difference with Emacs.  We never had such a large group of
> > active developers.
> 
> Really?  How interesting.  Makes me proportionately more important to
> Emacs than I thought I was. :-)

I knew there was a compliment there somewhere...

> The old-timers on this list should be asking themselves why, when Emacs
> is so undeniably important, it can't attract as many developers as a
> mere fantasy game.

That's not a question for me.  It's quite clear to me why programming
a game would be more fun than programming a text editor.

And if you are hinting that using CVS is the reason, then I must say
that in the 15 years I've been involved in Emacs development (using
RCS at first, btw), I don't think I've ever heard some potential
contributor say that she refuses to come on board because of the VCS
we use.  Maybe my memory is failing me, who knows.

> The Emacs project, though, is still operating at a scale and tempo I
> think of as being typical of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I think
> we are limited by poor tools, and by habits of thought derived from
> those poor tools.

My analysis is different: I think we are limited by a small number of
core developers, and by the lack of head maintainer(s) who could
devote much more time than any of us can evidently provide to coding
and leading the rest of the developers.