Re: Minor features and enhancements

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2016 01:27:47 +0200
> 
> The need to improve Emacs in minor ways can help us discover and fix problems in basic functionality. Whether a basic function should change is obviously a more important issue than a minor fix elsewhere, and so needs more discussion and review. When evaluating proposed improvements to basic functions, stability is an important merit but it's not the only one.

These are general principles with which I fully agree.

> Any general policy of avoiding changes to basic functions that only fix annoyances would be hard to distinguish from a policy that simply avoids changes to basic functions

I didn't declare any policy -- I'm not authorized for that in the
first place, and based on past experience won't expect the crowd to
accept even if I was.  It was just a heads-up -- that's my conclusion
from the past few years of watching Emacs development and
participating in it.  When reviewing proposed changes of this nature,
my tendency will be to object to changes in core that aim at minor
improvements.  IMO, the rule should be: minor improvements should be
accomplished by minor changes outside of the core, or not at all.

> after all, what one person considers important another can easily say is only an annoyance. 

Assuming we all are reasonable people, the above is indeed a judgment
call, but only up to a point.  E.g., I wouldn't expect anyone here to
claim in good faith that non-support for bidirectional scripts was
merely an "annoyance".