Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Cc: acm@muc.de,
>     eggert@cs.ucla.edu,
>     rms@gnu.org,
>     emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 03:32:01 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > The net result of this extremely slow progress is that many
>  > theoretical niceties
> 
> Availability of fonts with complete Latin repertoire and convenient
> input methods are not theoretical niceties any more.  They are
> practical realities on any platform produced in the last decade.

Try the Windows console some day.

>  > > and that his reaction is pre-judgment without enough relevant
>  > > experience.
>  > 
>  > "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you."
>  > Just because Some People™ might have prejudice against these quotes,
>  > it doesn't mean their introduction won't make our lives less
>  > convenient.
> 
> That is completely out of context.  In the part you quote here, I was
> arguing against a priori judgments for the whole project and all its
> users, without any data except introspection to back them up.  Not
> that inconvenience for the opponents was zero to ten decimal places.

I'm saying that the problems might be real even though those who speak
about them have prejudice, and therefore dismissing those problems
just because of that prejudice might be a mistake.

> But guess what?  AFAICT, the rest of the software world doesn't have
> these problems.  People are typing scores of odd characters in email
> to me all the time.  And not just Japanese, but good ol' boys and
> girls from the U S of A.  How do they manage that, I wonder?

My guess would be that the mail composing program inserts Unicode
quotes when the user types ASCII quotes.

> I see benefits to third parties that *you* ignore

I don't ignore them.  You will not see me objecting to these changes
in any of the relevant discussions.  I just think that we shouldn't
dismiss so easily the issues these changes bring with them.  IOW, we
should see this issue in its delicate balance.

>  > While reverting a bunch of commits (whose number is growing by the
>  > hour, btw) might be relatively easy, those commits affect everyone
>  > who is using Emacs, as reverting them, locally is hardly a
>  > practical option.
> 
> Huh?  People deal with exactly this problem all the time, for example
> package maintainers in GNU/Linux distros.  Sure, it's a skill you have
> to spend time developing, and I know that many people prefer not to
> invest their time that way.  But "not practical" is too dismissive.
> It *is* a practical option, used by many in some contexts.

It is not practical for me, as it will take too much time, time that I
don't have.  I prefer that we did these changes right the first time
-- as we have been doing recently.