Ronan Waide <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On August 10, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
>> I am also (personally) not thrilled with the attitude of refusing to
>> support CVS Emacs. I understand the reasoning behind it---trying to
>> catch up with a moving target plus lack of resources.
>
> My major gripe with trying to support CVS Emacs (or CVS XEmacs, for
> that matter) is simply that it's not stable (this has also applied to
> several dot releases of Emacs, in particular the 20.x series which
> seemed to break multibyte characters with almost every release). I get
> someone sending me a mail about a bug this week, and next week it's
> not a bug anymore because it was a bug in Emacs, not BBDB, and it's
> been fixed at source. Regardless of issues of moving targets or lack
> of resources, trying to maintain a complex piece of code on top of an
> unstable platform is a complete waste of time.
True and I agree. That's part of what I meant by "moving target". A
reasonable way out of this, however [especially since there are I
think a number of CVS Emacs users on this list, so you get a some
testing base] is to try and track down the problem, sit on it for a
couple of weeks (major CVS trouble/bugs/glitches usually get caught in
a day or a couple of days at the worst) and then incorporate the change.
>> It would be nice if an official policy regarding BBDB was stated
>> someplace.
>
> I disagree. Official policies are for products and politicians. BBDB
> is neither; BBDB is, and always has been, hackerware, and while much
> has been done to make it less menacing to those unfamiliar with lisp,
> it's still a rat's nest of surprises and dead ends and really, if
> you're doing anything non-trivial with it, you'll have to get your
> hands dirty with lisp at some point.
I did not mean that one should have a 100 page policy manual, with a
full-time lawyer. However, being the maintainer [or whatever your
official title is] you are in effect in charge of what changes are
made, if ever (short of forking another version and local hacks).
Hence it is nice to know which changes you will not consider, more or
less as a matter of "policy".
>> My own "official policy"
Understood. This was precisely what I was looking for.
> I don't object to maintaining BBDB; on the contrary, I volunteered for
> the job when noone else seemed to be interested. I do object to
> anything that makes it more of a chore than it already is. Which I
> think is a rough summary of what I've said above.
Thanks for volunteering...
> And now, we return you to our regularly scheduled list traffic.
I'll drink to that. :)
Cheers,
--Boris
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