Re: My resignation from Emacs development

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Richard.

On Sun, Nov 24, 2024 at 23:28:14 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

> If we explicitly establish that normal practice of Emacs development
> is to to discuss every significant feature change or redesign on
> emacs-devel -- as I have advcated before -- would you be willing to
> rejoin Emacs development?

I think that's been the normal practice in Emacs for just about ever.

My gripe is specifically with Stefan Monnier, who has failed to follow
this practice on quite a few occasions over the years, as I have
catalogued in some detail in this thread.

Also, when promoting his own changes, Stefan has frequently answered
reasonable questions with "politicians' answers" - evasive non-answers.
The latest such post was his post in this thread, where he somehow
managed to avoid addressing my criticisms of his past behaviour.  In
particular, he failed to admit any wrongdoing, and failed to give any
undertakings about the future.

Also, the current three maintainers have all explicitly said they see no
problem with Stefan's behaviour here.  If I were to rejoin the Emacs
project (assuming I'd be welcome, which might not be the case after all
I've written), nothing would have changed.  All the unpleasantness in
this thread would have been for nothing.  And I'd likely continue to get
angry about Stefan in the future.

The immediate problem - the use of CC Mode's symbols to mean other
things - has no available compromise.  Eli and I failed to reach such a
compromise after extensive exchanges, both on emacs-devel and in private
email.

So it doesn't look like I'll be rejoining the Emacs project any time
soon.  Sorry.

> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).