Some of his senior devs don’t get it…Īnd if the idea of RMS and ESR cooperating to subvert Emacs’s decades-old culture from within strikes you as both entertaining and bizarrely funny…yeah, it is. It takes forever to say anything in their strange, rumbling language.įortunately, RMS recognizes that this points at a real problem. They possess unbelievable strength, are infuriatingly slow, and their land is entirely devoid of women. Vast, ancient, gnarled and mostly impenetrable, tended by a small band of shepherds old as the world itself, under the command of their leader, Neckbeard. My favorite quote about this is from Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings: Because Emacs can be a total environment that you never have to step out of, the culture around it has tended to become inward-looking and hold on to habits that smell two decades old now. Read the recent emacs-devel list archives if you’re really curious.įixing these things are important to me as part of a larger project: cracking Emacs out of an encrustation of practices and history that has made it seem insular and archaic to a lot of younger hackers who grew up with the faster pace and the techniques of the web.
What else needs to be done?” Quite a lot, actually, starting with lifting Bazaar commit references into a form that will still make sense in a git log listing. You might think “Huh? Emacs already has a git mirror. He’s not entirely convinced yet of this, but he’s listening.
Oh, and time to abolish info entirely in favor of HTML. I’m also talking with RMS about the possibility that it’s time to shoot Texinfo through the head and go with a more modern, Web-friendly master format. In retrospect, choosing Bazaar as DVCS was a mistake that has presented unnecessary friction costs to a lot of contributors. This is a brief heads-up that the reason I’ve been blog silent lately is that I’m concentrating hard on a sprint with what I consider a large payoff: getting the Emacs project fully converted to git.