Re: EmacsW32 invocation options

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,
>  help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> From: Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@Web.DE>
> Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 01:03:23 +0200
> 
> I don't think it's a bad situation. Their developers have particular  
> hobbies or preferences. If they were not allowed to change things  
> they might be like me: not developing anything.

No one can disallow changing Free Software.  But no one can disallow
me from having an opinion about such projects, either.

Now, while I'm quite ignorant about the Mac and the user expectations
on that platform, I do know a lot about Windows (and work on that OS
myself many hours a day).  So, while my opinion about the situation on
the Mac does not matter (and therefore I won't comment on it), that is
not the case on Windows.  I don't think the Windows environment is so
different from the Unix environment to justify different defaults in
most aspects of Emacs behavior.  (We do have different defaults in
some aspects that do matter, such as the end-of-line convention, for
example.)

> IMO it would be fine if the "official" GNU Emacs site would point to  
> sites providing "non-official" flavours of GNU Emacs, and these sites  
> would document their changes and additions.

Maybe it is a good idea, but I still think that proliferation of
different default behaviors is an impediment for newbies.  Witness the
problems with helping Debian users because the packages are influenced
by site-init files that change many aspects of the default behavior.