<story><title>Bad NEWS, Emacs</title><url>https://eshelyaron.com/posts/2023-12-10-bad-news.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tarsius</author><text>When a breaking change is made on Emacs&amp;#x27; development branch, whether intentionally or not, and some users voice concerns about that change, then the change isn&amp;#x27;t reverted the minute those concerns are raised. The pros and cons are discussed, different solutions are implemented and improved, and finally a compromise is found.&lt;p&gt;Users raising their concern started three days ago. That&amp;#x27;s not enough for this process to have concluded already.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a recent message by Eli (and the message he is responding to).&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    &amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m hoping the old behavior stays the default and the new behaviour
    &amp;gt; is what users can opt in with a variable.
    &amp;gt; 
    &amp;gt; If that is what normally happens for much less disruptive changes,
    &amp;gt; why isn&amp;#x27;t it happening for this deep impacting one?
    
    Because the original discussion of these changes, between two people
    who were interested and involved, indicated that the new behavior
    makes much more sense than the old one.  Now, that others chimed in
    with the opposite views, we are still discussing what should be the
    behavior, and once that is concluded, we can talk about the defaults.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
So I think this has been blown way out of proportion. IMO there are some serious issues in how Emacs is developed. I don&amp;#x27;t have a solution but I think that us users&amp;#x2F;package-maintainers thinking to ourselves &amp;quot;gee there sure are a lot of stubborn people on emacs-devel, what&amp;#x27;s wrong with them?&amp;quot; and then the second a change is made that we strongly disagree with, we start behaving like the world is ending, that might be a problem. This is how maintainers get defensive (you might have noticed that in the projects that &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; maintain).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yaantc</author><text>Thank you @tarsius! Couldn&amp;#x27;t have said it better.&lt;p&gt;To add, I have issues with the attitude shown by the blog author.&lt;p&gt;If you use the development branch, you can&amp;#x27;t raise hell when there&amp;#x27;s a breaking change: it&amp;#x27;s to be expected!&lt;p&gt;Then it&amp;#x27;s fine to disagree on some change and discuss this. I read the email thread, and I do not see &amp;quot;arrogance&amp;quot;. Just strong disagreement. So yes, converging will take a bit of time... Calling publicly someone &amp;quot;arrogant&amp;quot; for not folding back to your view, and trying to raise the crowd (a good part of whom won&amp;#x27;t read the thread to make their own opinion) looks like bullying to me.&lt;p&gt;Saying that his patch to make the change optional has been disregarded, when it was rejected because it not only made the change optional (that would have been OK, and a patch for this asked for) but removed other changes is not honest.&lt;p&gt;Lastly, pointing out one person to blame when the whole discussion is done with the Emacs maintainers in the loop is also a no-go in my book.&lt;p&gt;As a close to 30 years Emacs user, thank you to all its contributors! (and to Thierry, as long time Helm user) May their skin by thick, it&amp;#x27;s unfortunately sometimes needed :-P</text></comment>
<story><title>Bad NEWS, Emacs</title><url>https://eshelyaron.com/posts/2023-12-10-bad-news.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tarsius</author><text>When a breaking change is made on Emacs&amp;#x27; development branch, whether intentionally or not, and some users voice concerns about that change, then the change isn&amp;#x27;t reverted the minute those concerns are raised. The pros and cons are discussed, different solutions are implemented and improved, and finally a compromise is found.&lt;p&gt;Users raising their concern started three days ago. That&amp;#x27;s not enough for this process to have concluded already.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a recent message by Eli (and the message he is responding to).&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    &amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m hoping the old behavior stays the default and the new behaviour
    &amp;gt; is what users can opt in with a variable.
    &amp;gt; 
    &amp;gt; If that is what normally happens for much less disruptive changes,
    &amp;gt; why isn&amp;#x27;t it happening for this deep impacting one?
    
    Because the original discussion of these changes, between two people
    who were interested and involved, indicated that the new behavior
    makes much more sense than the old one.  Now, that others chimed in
    with the opposite views, we are still discussing what should be the
    behavior, and once that is concluded, we can talk about the defaults.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
So I think this has been blown way out of proportion. IMO there are some serious issues in how Emacs is developed. I don&amp;#x27;t have a solution but I think that us users&amp;#x2F;package-maintainers thinking to ourselves &amp;quot;gee there sure are a lot of stubborn people on emacs-devel, what&amp;#x27;s wrong with them?&amp;quot; and then the second a change is made that we strongly disagree with, we start behaving like the world is ending, that might be a problem. This is how maintainers get defensive (you might have noticed that in the projects that &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; maintain).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbluepolarbear</author><text>That’s a bad process. The review of the feature should start before it’s merged into main branch, not after. It totally reasonable for people to be upset with a breaking feature in main branch without discussing it with the community at large. Changes merged in like this are how long standing tool lose community support.</text></comment>