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diff --git a/technical/reviews/mailing-lists.md b/technical/reviews/mailing-lists.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c63d376 --- /dev/null +++ b/technical/reviews/mailing-lists.md @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +# Emacs + +## 2019-01 + +### [Apropos 54f297904e0c: Temporarily comment out CC Mode from tests which are incompatible with it.][cc-mode/electric-pair] + +A thread that feels very representative of the friction between +"keeping things working as they always did" vs. "simplifying that huge +lumbering beast of a codebase". I find [Stefan Monnier's +intervention][cc-mode/electric-pair-stefan] helpful because it +captures both sides of the argument quite well: + +> >> I understand that there's a transition needed between these two and this +> >> intermediate state can require more work, but it's important to keep the +> >> long term goal in mind when designing the current solution. +> > Whose long term goal? +> +> At the very least mine. +> +> > My goal, both long and short term, is to keep CC Mode +> > working properly. +> +> That's orthogonal. +> +> To give you a similarly general goal, my own goal is to make it so that +> **any feature which makes sense in many major mode be implemented once and +> then used in the relevant major modes, rather than being implemented +> independently for those major modes.** +> +> This is both for uniformity between major modes, and because it both +> simplifies and improves many major modes (which would otherwise either +> not provide the feature or only in very primitive ways). +> +> **And those maintainers like you who did go to the trouble of being early +> implementers of the feature suffer through the pain of having to adapt +> their code once the generic version of the feature becomes available.** +> Sometimes even at the cost of having the new feature working slightly +> worse in some corner cases. +> +> But many of them are quite happy to be able to drop their old code and +> get rid of that responsibility (i.e. bug reports about regressions can +> be redirected to Emacs maintainers). + +On a non-technical note, this thread allowed RMS to advertise the [GNU +Kind Communications Guidelines][gnu-kind-communication]: + +> To ask "who started it" is to oversimplify. Often what happens +> is that a little harshness creeps into a discussion, then people +> react to that in a way that is a little more harsh. So nobody +> "started it" but multiple people exacerbated it. +> +> **Thus, part of the effort is, when we feel harshness coming at us, +> to damp it down rather than hitting back.** + +[cc-mode/electric-pair]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-01/msg00360.html +[cc-mode/electric-pair-stefan]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-01/msg00518.html +[gnu-kind-communication]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html + +### [Documentation about the completion framework][completion-documentation] + +Helpful pointers for whoever wants to dig into completion plumbing. +Personally, I struggled to get to grips with it when [debugging some +`icomplete` issue][icomplete-issue], relying on the source for +information, and giving up while trying to write an automated test +case. + +[completion-documentation]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-01/msg00504.html +[icomplete-issue]: https://gitlab.com/peniblec/memory-leaks/commit/dcc0c05dc1f6a22645bf9355b72aa44b49776620 |