Re: Emacs: Problems of the Scratch Buffer

[Chiron <chiron613.no.spam.@no.spam.please.gmail.com>]

On Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:35:58 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Chiron <chiron613.no.spam.@no.spam.please.gmail.com> Date: Sat,
>> 21 Apr 2012 14:59:34 GMT
>> 
>> I am arguing for the right of the current maintainers to make or to not
>> make whatever changes they feel are appropriate; and I am saying that
>> if the maintainers don't choose to make certain changes, that does not
>> necessarily make them fossils, behind the times, stupid, or whatever. 
>> It may simply be that they don't think those changes are important.
> 
> A purely theoretical argument that is not relevant to the reality (in
> which the maintainers _do_ make changes requested by users, albeit not
> automatically and not without discussing them first).

Eli, I was responding to someone who was complaining that these 
maintainers weren't making certain changes that the person felt would be 
good.  Whoever this person was (he's in this thread, but I'm not going to 
go digging for it) said something mildly derogatory about the 
maintainers, as though their failure to make these changes was in some 
way a defect.  I argued that the maintainers had the right to not make 
the changes, and that doesn't make them deficient in any way.

It is only a "purely theoretical" argument if taken out of context.

Oh, yes.  Someone also was criticizing me for saying, in effect, "If you 
don't like emacs, don't use emacs."  His solution was to try to get 
someone to change emacs to make it more attractive to new users, because 
if you had lots of new users this would lead to an improved product.

By that logic, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Word would be the best 
software out there.  I'm not sure everyone would agree with such a claim, 
though.

-- 
Duty, n:
	What one expects from others.
		-- Oscar Wilde