Re: My resignation from Emacs development

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Eli.

On Fri, Nov 22, 2024 at 10:11:27 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Madhu <enometh@meer.net>
> > Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:54:01 +0530

> > * Adam Porter <169c6564-4722-4338-a049-5f8f3ce69394@alphapapa.net> :
> > Wrote on Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:35:35 -0600:

> > > But it is not okay for you to blame Stefan for your decision to leave.
> > >  As you know, in the past he served as the Emacs maintainer, and now he
> > > remains a prominent contributor, and a maintainer of some parts of
> > > Emacs, but not of the overall project.  So if you can't abide some
> > > technical decisions that have been made by Stefan M., you ought to take
> > > them up with Eli, Andrea, and Stefan K.  And if they disagree with you
> > > and won't overturn those decisions, and you decide to leave, you ought
> > > to ascribe that responsibility simply and honestly, not by publicly
> > > defaming Stefan M. like this.  It does not behoove you, nor the GNU
> > > Emacs project, to act this way.

> > The correct response to these complaints would be if Eli and the
> > maintainers would reign in Stefan and address the genuine concerns
> > rather than gerrymandering on with the present course.

> > This again purposely misses the point and does not address the isssue
> > raised by the resignation. That there are problems with Stefans
> > intentions which are not as stated which are of concern to emacs
> > development as a whole, these are being swept under the floor. There are
> > repeated concerns that the way Stefan is leading development us
> > destroying the value of core which RMS brought to us from the 70s. This
> > is being set aside through bulldozering narrative.

> When we see such problems, they are _never_ swept under the carpet.
> On the contrary, the reaction is usually immediate and quite harsh,
> including (but not limited to) reverting the offending changes in a
> non-negotiable way.

> The reason this didn't happen with Stefan Monnier is that at least I
> don't see any particular problem of this kind in what Stefan does (and
> did during the decades of his very active involvement in the project).

I have taken the trouble to outline and analyse in detail several places
where Stefan's contributions have given rise to trouble, at least for me
personally, and certainly for some other contributors.  Up till now, none
of you, Stefan K, or Andrea have replied with the same level of detail,
or even acknowledged what I wrote.  I'm disappointed at this.

> The Emacs model of development is that we completely trust leading
> contributors to install changes without discussing them.  This trust
> works well and keeps our development moving forward very fast,
> although sometimes there are good-faith mistakes, which then require
> discussions a-posteriori, and sometimes (rarely) end up with changes
> being reverted or radically modified.

The model of development for all contributors bar Stefan M has involved
open discussion on emacs-devel before big changes.  No other leading
contributor has violated this convention that I'm aware of.  For example,
when you implemented the display-line-numbers facility, you did so
entirely in public.  This resulted in several bugs being found by other
people and corrected, and resulted in a smoother introduction of the
feature than otherwise would have been the case.

> All of the leading contributors, including yours truly, have sometimes,
> rarely, made such mistakes.  Stefan's record is not different in this
> regard from any other's.

Eli, how can you say this?  Stefan's record is _very_ different.  I could
not have posted five anecdotes about any other contributor the way I did
yesterday for Stefan.  The way he makes big changes to Emacs could almost
be calculated to cause "mistakes".

> The changes he installed in March indeed should have been discussed
> more, but I don't expect us rejecting them as result.

I have been trying to get you, Stefan K, and Andrea to analyse _why_
these changes were not discussed more.  Those changes are what led to my
resignation.

> Moreover, Alan himself made such a mistake when he installed his
> cc-mode.el change back in May, the change which led to bug#74339, and
> eventually to this sad result (because Alan staunchly opposed to
> modifying his change from back then, even though the modifications
> proposed to him would not affect the effect of his change in any way).

My mistake was more political than technical.  Had I been more forthright
in exposing the problem in May, I still doubt anything would have been
done about it, precisely because the commit causing it was made by "a
leading contributor".  That is an expectation I wouldn't have had two
days ago.

> So there's nothing here that requires any "reigning in", just the
> normal practice of Emacs development, which hasn't changed in decades,
> because we think it fits well the way this community is structured,
> and the nature and the vast span of expertise needed to develop and
> maintain Emacs.

I have regrettably resigned from Emacs, precisely because of this "normal
practice of Emacs development".

[ .... ]

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).