On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 01:30:01PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > On 11/16/2013 01:10 PM, Mark Brown wrote: > > Your assertations here both seem rather strong and unsupported, > > especially the idea that people don't use Emacs in graphical mode - it > I have yet to see someone who does. I'm a long-time emacs user > and so are many of other developers I work together with and everyone > I know of who uses emacs as their primary editor doesn't use X11 > support, you just don't need it in most cases. emacs is powerful through > it's keyboard shortcuts and you are much more efficient and > faster when using them as opposed to navigating through the > menus with your mouse. There are other users who do use graphical mode, indeed I was reminded at the mini-Debconf today that the main reason XEmacs got forked was that GNU Emacs was too resistant to implementing a GUI. I guess some people use menus or whatever but I expect you'll find it's mostly just to make it look pretty and smoother interaction with other programs. > Well, as I said, if you're really using emacs for what it's renown > for, you don't care about the X11 user interface and the looks > because you use non-windowed mode anyway. There's no cause and effect there, and if the GUI really was inessential for editors we ought to disable it for them in Debian since it's at best a waste of time to compile it and a potential source of bugs. > If someone is so keen to actually prefer XEmacs over emacs, they > can just download and build the package from source. This does apply to most of the software in Debian of course... Debian has always had a kitchen sink approach to including things, we do have quite a few architectures as well for example and I'm not sure that our position as the leading platform for languages such as brainfuck is considered critical by many. > > At the end of the day if you're not interested in a leaf package just > > ignore it, work on something you do care about instead. > No, I do care about the whole of Debian and not just about my particular > packages and honestly, it bothers me to no end when I see packages which > have dozens or hundreds of bugs unanswered because no one is stepping > in to fix that. And I think Paul feels the same. I rather prefer to > have a package removed than it being full of bugs, no matter whether > it's a leaf package or not. Well, there do seem to be a lot of bugs open against the Linux kernel... > A constant quality control of Debian as a whole is important as a whole > for being able to reduce the freeze time as we have learnt in the past. The things that make a meaningful difference to the freeze time are (or should be) the packages that we can't get rid of for whatever reason and the packages that sit in the middle of dependency chains.
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