Re: Making font-lock handle long lines better

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Jostein Kjønigsen <jostein@secure.kjonigsen.net>
> Date: Tue, 15 May 2018 10:08:46 +0200
> 
> But if I understand this correctly this is a bug which was filed and debugged in 2013, half a decade ago, with a
> known fix, but the bug is still in the Emacs codebase. 
> 
> Why? Because whoever filed and diagnosed the bug in the first place can't/won't signed copyright
> assignment papers.

That's not my reading of the discussion in that bug.  The copyright
assignment issue is only tangentially related to the bug, it was
mentioned wrt a package shown in the discussion, but that package is
not the solution to the problem.

As the solution to the problem it was proposed to remove support for
omake or disable it by default.  Upon re-reading the discussion, I
didn't perceive any consensus regarding that proposal.  In any case,
deletion of some lines doesn't require any copyright assignment.

> Now that the problem is solved, can't someone else just make the edit, write the patch, and make this terrible
> bug go away? It's a one-line diff after all. We do provide exceptions for such small patches after all.

If there's an agreement to do that, it should be easy.  But I'm not
sure there as an agreement.

> - Are there any systems in place to follow up "solved" bugs which doesn't result in commits?

This is a volunteer project.  Our "system" in place involves a few
motivated individuals, like Noam and a few others, who routinely
review old bug reports.  If you are asking whether we have people
whose assigned job is to do that, then no.

> - Do we know how many such bugs there currently are?

Please define "such bugs".  The bug tracker supports queries, so given
a specification, we could probably provide an answer.

> - And what improvements could we make to Emacs if there was an initiative to get all those issues properly
> closed?

I hope that more people volunteer to take care of bug reports, both
old and new.  Would you like to work on that?

Thanks.