We're all on the same side supposedly (building a better Emacs and a stronger Emacs community), yet such discussions feel very hostile to me. And the Emacs maintainers claim that I'm being hostile to them. I can't see how the Emacs community will gain something useful out of such unpleasant exchanges. For me the net result so far is that I'd be less willing to engage in work with Emacs's upstream, just because I don't like the tone of the conversations here and the implied accusations that only the Emacs team knows what's best for the Emacs users.
>
>>> Why? If the NonGNU people are "too cool for school" after having been
>>> invited to GNU, why should the GNU project make even more special
>>> accomodations for them? Not up to me to decide anyway.
>>
>> Mainly because this will affect users, not the maintainer.
>> [...]
>> Also, I don't see a reason to provoke the Clojure-mode maintainers. I
>> disagree with their reasoning and fear they have been misinformed, but
>> the best way to remedy situations like these is to be understanding and
>> prove ourselves to be cooperative by example (IMO).
>
> You seem to be under the misguided impression that my proposal is meant
> to bother, provoke or help change the minds of the NonGNU Clojure
> maintainers? It's not.
>
> I simply think they shouldn't have a say in how the Emacs project
> answers Richard's original request of a Clojure editing mode in Emacs
> propoer.
IMHO that is disproportionately combative. Regardless of whether
clojure-mode maintainers contribute to core and/or GNU ELPA, they
contribute to Emacs's continued success by serving their users's needs
and keeping these users invested in Emacs.
I think they deserve the courtesy of not encroaching if alternatives can
be found; I second Philip's assessment above.
> As to naming, it's not my call, so let's have Richard chime in.
> clojure-mode, newclojure-mode, etc, I personally don't care, since I'm
> not a Clojure user.
My 2¢, as a passive observer, not a Clojure programmer either, whose
only interests lie in (a) alienating as few people as possible (b)
getting dopamine hits from finding specks of consistency amidst chaos:
* "lisp-clojure-mode", following other "FAMILY-DIALECT-mode" examples
like "makefile-gmake-mode",
* no specific name (keep the name from the inherited mode,
lisp-data-mode in your example), just a mode-line hint, following
other "FAMILY[DIALECT]" examples like sh-script and
"Shell-script[bash]".