Re: ehelp woes, or why I hate a module that I love so much

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Juanma Barranquero <lektu@terra.es> writes:

> But that kind of situation tends to make developers lose interest really
> fast. How many have left Emacs development because the things they were
> interested in are (sometimes actively) discouraged? And, with your
> argument, what's the relative importance of integrating Guile, when
> Emacs already has a fine and tested extension language? Why replace
> something that works, instead of focusing on developing new features more
> oriented towards the *user*, as oposed as the developer (who's the only
> one that will, perhaps, get any improvement from Guile)? The hundred of
> thousands of users implied in your message aren't interested in
> programming Emacs, just using it and customizing it (through Customize).

I think having Emacs support Guile would be very visible to users, as
it likely would mean having threads which UI wise is probably the most
important new feature added to Emacs since it started supporting
windowing systems.  IMHO it is more important than GTK/Gnome or
Unicode support.

But generally I agree, most developers help a project because they
find something fun to work on, and if that is discouraged they get
bored and do something else instead (like, say, forks the application
and starts working on that ;-)).