Re: New Package for NonGNU-ELPA: clojure-ts-mode

[Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>]

On 27/08/2023 16:09, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> your contributions and efforts are greatly appreciated, but that's not
> what I meant.  I meant leading the migration process to the
> (allegedly) new and better tools, then assessing how well they fit us
> and making whatever changes are needed, or concluding they failed the
> tests.

Thank you, of course.

But I'm not sure I could lead anything in this process, given that we 
can't seem to agree on the basic goals.

>>> It is definitely _un_reasonable to suggest/demand such changes when
>>> you are doing nothing in practice towards that goal.
>>
>> What do you want me to do? Set up a standalone Bugzilla installation for
>> people to try out? There is an existing demo at
>> https://bugzilla-dev.allizom.org/home.
>>
>> Create a migration script from the Debbugs database to Bugzilla's
>> format?
> 
> Some of that, yes.
> 
>> I could probably do that too. But that would result in nothing
>> without the leadership's buy-in, just like our Gitlab instance is
>> stagnating for a couple of years now.
> 
> If you do a good job, and the tools are useful, they _will_ be used,
> and then a buy-in might be a no-brainer.  We will see when we get
> there.

There is no point in me doing either, if the catching issue is how other 
developers find it possible (or not) to work with specific tools. 
Migrating the database isn't going to change that.

Should we go through another round of listing bug trackers and voting, 
or something?

>>>> The existing tools "lack important features" to such a degree that it's
>>>> not even funny.
>>>
>>> "Important" for whom?  We are doing a reasonable job with them, given
>>> the available human resources, don't we?  Bugs are triaged,
>>> investigated, and most of them fixed; patches are reviewed, commented,
>>> and installed.  We'd love better tools -- who won't? -- but every tool
>>> we examined until now had important gaps.
>>
>> Important for allowing more people participate in the conversations.
> 
> That's not the main goal of these tools, as far as the maintainers are
> considered.

If collecting user feedback and communicating with users is not the main 
goal, and reducing maintainers' workload is the priority, I guess we 
should stop asking for more code to be contributed in Emacs. At least as 
far as anything that can possibly live in ELPA is concerned (meaning: 
clojure-ts-mode yes, project.el or xref no). Let the developers use the 
trackers they are comfortable with, with maximum flexibility. The 
proverbial "lean core".

BTW, if js-ts-mode and others lived in ELPA, there wouldn't be an issue 
of Emacs 29.1 users having ts modes incompatible with the latest 
grammars (they'd just upgrade Elisp code over ELPA).

>> Perhaps Lisp is denser than JavaScript or C, and et cetera, but it's
>> hard to argue that Emacs is more complex, or even comparable, to
>> Firefox.
> 
> No, it isn't hard.  Compare the number of domains whose expertise we
> need, that's the important aspect.

They would obviously have more.

>> And if they reached this size in 20 years rather than 40, it's
>> an evidence to better productivity rather than the opposite, right?
> 
> They have a Web browser, that's all.

Yeah, a program written in C/C++/Rust which contains an interpreter (and 
multiple jit's) for a dynamic programming language and has most of its 
interface written in it, supports user extensions in the same language, 
support display of arbitrary files and has several related but different 
mechanisms for guiding the visuals and the layout of said display. It 
also supports bidi.

>>> What is missing is the number of active developers in each project
>>> (which requires a definition of "active developer"), the means and
>>> tools they use for issue tracking, and whatever else is relevant.
>>
>> According to
>> https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/the-new-firefox-by-the-numbers/
>> (article from 2017),
>>
>>     > 700 authors contributed code to Firefox over ~1 year
>>
>>     80 of them were volunteers, "contributors from all over the world".
>>
>> and by those 700 authors:
>>
>>     75,342 files changed
>>     4,888,199 lines were added
>>     6,886,199 lines were changed
> 
> Counting just "authors" and "contributors" doesn't tell enough, but at
> least show the comparable numbers for Emacs, okay?

I figured you have said numbers at hand, more or less. But they must be 
lower.

If you like I can try producing them, but what point would you be trying 
to make?

The point I was trying to make that a big and complex project with many 
contributors (bigger than ours, more complex than ours, with more 
developers than here) can be well-served by a workflow that is rather 
different from ours.