RE: Recentish C-s M-y change

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> >    More and more (my impression), things, even major
> >    things, are getting changed through just bug reports.
> >    Dunno whether that's intentionally to avoid wider
> >    discussion, but it has that effect.
> >
> > I share that impression as well, it does seems that the modus operandi
> > is to change first, discuss later.
> 
> I think this impression might be skewed.  Many people feel the
> opposite: that we discuss too much, and moreover, that starting a
> discussion on emacs-devel almost invariably leads to stalemate that
> blocks the proposed changes.

Sounds to me like you're rather confirming my
impression - just expressing (skewing?) it a bit
differently.

Someone who wants to make a change and not risk
discussion that involves actually _proposing_ the
change, and that might lead to the change ultimately
not being agreed to, may decide to do an end-run, by
"fixing" a "bug" instead.

We all know here that discussion on emacs-devel does
NOT "invariably" lead to stalemate that blocks changes.

There can in fact be no "stalemate", because we have
a decider - you.  Instead of stalemate, end-runners
might avoid a wider discussion that ends with your
decision to "block" the change.  (A decision I'm
often in agreement with, FWIW.)

> If someone wants to be intimately involved in the Emacs development,
> he or she should subscribe to the bug list, because many issues are
> discussed there (as they should be), and sometimes the conclusion is
> that we should make changes.

Of course.  Issues.  And even new feature requests.

But as mentioned, lately there have been some
pretty _big_ changes made that way.

It's a judgment call whether something should be
discussed in a bug thread or on emacs-devel.

My impression (and it's only that), is that more
and more some are choosing to do the former -
perhaps, as you suggest, to avoid a wider or longer
discussion, which might involve greater risk of
counter-arguments or push-back.

> It is impractical to expect that every potentially
> annoying or problematic change will be detected
> before it is committed, so I urge people not to
> develop such unrealistic expectations.

I don't think anyone has such expectations.  This
isn't a black-&-white thing.  It doesn't help much,
I think, to hypothesize expectations of "every"
this or that.