Re: Bug#729660: ITP: xemacs21 -- highly customizable text editor
[[ Not CC'ing bugs because this mail is not about technical stuff ]]
Greetings Fellow Debianists,
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 first mail came with the argument that you think that
> >> xemacs is more visually appealing than emacs. Honestly, emacs
> >> is primarily a tool and not an optical gimmick. Visual
> >> appearance does not bother most users, I'd guess. Most emacs
> >> users use the terminal (-nw) mode anyway.
> >
> > 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.
How about knowing the shortcuts while having emacs running in a
window?
>
> > would be enormously surprising to me if people had abandoned X11 support
> > en masse. As for people not caring about the appearence... if you're
> > going to be looking at something for the best part of the day it seems
> > strange that you'd not be interested in how it looks, it's a factor in
> > usability.
>
> 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.
Come on, John Paul Adrian, how can you assert all these things? Did
you do any survey? Do you really think that your few colleagues
actually are a mirror of a whole community of people using software
for doing lots of different things? I do use plain GNU Emacs with a
grahical interface (that is, with X11, not in console mode) the whole
day, for doing either LaTeX, C/C++, Python, Bash, XML, WhatEver
stuff...
How about letting Mark do his job as a Debian Developer and judge him
on his abilities to fix things? I have absolutely no interest in
defining if XEmacs is worth it in Debian or not. The usage count
should somehow help us. Can we assume that Mark will show a
responsible behaviour? Also, may I ask how what he is trying to do is
so detrimental to the project that we feel like spending time chirping
about it?
Don't we have other interesting Debian-Project-related things to
discuss about ?
> As I explained before, the problem with such packages is that they
> can introduce unnecessary (RC) bugs which may delay the release
> during the freeze. I am aware of the fact that the release team has
> addressed the issue by removing packages from testing now which
> have had RC bugs longer than a certain time frame, but I think we should
> avoid such situations in the first place. And the fact that a very
> limited group of users is using XEmacs doesn't justify the hassle.
If there are RC bugs for unused software, the software needs to be
removed and thus does not go into stable. Period. If this removal work
is done well before the freeze, better. Again, let Mark do his job and
check the package in due time.
> If someone is so keen to actually prefer XEmacs over emacs, they
> can just download and build the package from source.
Selfish vision, to my humble opinion. That way of thinking defeats the
whole idea of having software to help people do what they want the way
they want.
>
> > 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.
Mark is indeed trying to fix the bugs, if I understand
correctly. Let's assume he is a responsible and technically sound DD.
Ciao
Filippo
--
Filippo Rusconi, PhD - public crypto key C78F687C @ pgp.mit.edu
Researcher at CNRS and Debian Developer <lopippo@debian.org>
Author of ``massXpert'' at http://www.massxpert.org
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