Re: Development suggestions from an ENSIME developer

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> The number of manual actions one needs to do when processing a patch
> can be counted, and the counts can be compared.  The "normal" speed of
> each operation can also be measured.  So I see no issues of coming up
> with a more-or-less objective assessment of the proposed workflow vs
> the existing one.

Yup.

The system we have in use today for bug reports is a push-based one:
People use `M-x report-emacs-bug' and it lands in our email (or on
Gmane) and we (I mean Eli :-)) read{s,} it and respond{s,} to it, often
closing it within one or two interactions.

There are other, longer interactions (involving much code review and
back-and-forth discussion), of course, but these are not the typical
ones.

I'm all for having new and shiny and good systems for dealing with these
complex interactions, but if this new and shiny systems involves
pressing reload on a web page a lot, and tooling around with checkboxes
and editing stuff in a web browser even for the trivial bug reports (and
jumping back and forth between the browser and Emacs to examine and edit
the code), then it's difficult to see how that can possibly be more
efficient than the mail-based, Emacs-based bug report system we have
today.

But seeing is believing, so proponents of new shinyness should
demonstrate the superior workflow.  :-)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no