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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2023 00:05:25 +0200
> Cc: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>, Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>,
>  Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>, Danny Freeman
>  <danny@dfreeman.email>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>  manuel.uberti@inventati.org
> From: Jens Schmidt <jschmidt4gnu@vodafonemail.de>
> 
> Opening the MUA to compose a new mail is easy enough.  But then the
> problems start: No HTML mail, please, no top-posting (which is corporate
> standard), get your MUA to do decent line wrapping, do all these things
> so that your mail on emacs-devel looks like the mails of all the others.

None of this is true for Emacs mailing lists, not anymore.  HTML is
nowadays supported by all Emacs MUAs, even Rmail (and people use HTML
here all the time), top-posting is used by some people without causing
any "no top-posting" responses, and quite a few people here post
without wrapping lines all the time.

So I believe these negative experiences are either from many years ago
or from other places.

(Not saying using email doesn't require some getting used to, but at
least the above-mentioned factors are not among the obstacles one must
negotiate, not these days.)

> A side note on "Too much traffic?  Just rely on CC!":  I did so when I
> posted my first issue on the Org mailing list - and then started
> wondering why communication stopped.  Well, somebody replied only to
> the list, and it was rather cumbersome to set up a decent reply to join
> that thread again.

_That_ is worth commenting on the list when it happens: ask people to
use Reply All or Wide Reply or whatever it is called.  That's basic
email courtesy.  I get personal replies from people all the time and
always ask them to replay to the list as well when that happens.

> What I'm trying to say here is: Email might look like it's easy to use,
> but in the context of a mailing list it's not necessarily so, even from
> the technical side.  These text entry boxes on Github et al. definitely
> feel easier and more inviting to use.

Yes, but the cost is that you need to proactively to visit each and
every GitHub repository to see whether something new was posted in the
subjects of your interest, and then refresh the page every so often.
The significant advantage of email is that you don't need to poll, you
just subscribe to the few relevant mailing lists, and stuff gets
pushed to you.

> > Some people are afraid of communicating with the mailing list or
> > reporting bugs because of an image issue.  I have on more than one
> > occasion heard of people who intentionally avoid communicating with
> > emacs-devel due to bad experience.  Others fear sending a message out
> > into the blue and not knowing who will read and respond to what they
> > said, will they be shouted down or just ignored.
> 
> Exactly.  TBH I still have to assemble courage to post here.  All these
> top dogs with their super-dry yet elaborate communication style are
> surely, um, intimidating.  Po Lu's mails, to pick one example, are a
> constant source of new English vocabulary for me (recent addition:
> "brazen").

Why do you think those same people will change their style while
talking through GitHub-style "issues"?  They will use the same
language and the same attitudes.  There will be absolutely no
difference in this aspect if and when we start using the GitHub-style
Web interface for discussing issues.