Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 13:15 UTC (Fri) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039)
In reply to: Emacs discusses web-based development workflows by khim
Parent article: Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

> “Detailed instructions”? Like that one? Not “click here, type text there” actionable form? You have lost that [potential future] contributor then and there.

I'm not saying the Emacs way is easy. I did only a cursory reading of the instructions I found <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq/...> and, finding that it involved using Emacs, concluded it would probably make sense to an Emacs user (which I am not).

My point is that if I'm a first-time contributor, looking for the line of source on the Web (if you're a programmer, you probably have the source locally; if not a programmer, you're not going to go looking through the source) is not the way I'd go about trying to report a bug, and I'd hazard few people would do it that way.

You were judging Emacs' process based on the back roads rather than the main thoroughfare, and that's a terrible way to make an argument.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 13:49 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

> I did only a cursory reading of the instructions I found <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq/...> and, finding that it involved using Emacs, concluded it would probably make sense to an Emacs user (which I am not).

So… you have found the page and haven't actually bothered to actually read it? Let me do that for you:

The correct way to report Emacs bugs is to use the command M-x report-emacs-bug. It sets up a mail buffer with the essential information and the correct e-mail address, bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Anything sent there also appears in the newsgroup news:gnu.emacs.bug, but please use e-mail instead of news to submit the bug report. This ensures a reliable return address so you can be contacted for further details.

These instructions made perfect sense quarter-century ago. When most Unix systems had working e-mail setup and Windows was in it's infancy.

Today most novice developers use Windows (even if they are WSL users) and even rare ones who actually use Linux mostly don't have functioning mail setup on their workstations thus there would most definitely no “reliable return address”, and, most likely, bug-report sent with the use of that instruction would be delivered straight to /dev/null.

To realize how outdates and pointless these instructions are I want to point out that even LWN (and it's very old-fashioned web-site by today's standards) doesn't have any idea what to do with news: URL.

> My point is that if I'm a first-time contributor, looking for the line of source on the Web (if you're a programmer, you probably have the source locally; if not a programmer, you're not going to go looking through the source) is not the way I'd go about trying to report a bug, and I'd hazard few people would do it that way.

Again. Please try to talk to first year students some time. This is exactly how they would try to do that.

For them browser (and also mobile phone apps) is how they communicate. If they are emacs users then probably mobile phone apps are not that important, but e-mail is not something they use often and even if they use it they don have functioning MTA on their system, they use browser to receive and send emails.

Yes, I may not be 100% correct in trying to imagine how they would try to reach emacs developers, but it's just the fact that all venues which are on official sites wouldn't make any sense for them. They include use of certain tools which they have no idea about.

Worse: many of them assume certain things about local machine setup which are not true in today's world and weren't true for many years.

Heck, I'm not first-year student and I don't have my system setup in way which would allow me to use an official way of reporting bugs! I could probably tune it but why bother?

> You were judging Emacs' process based on the back roads rather than the main thoroughfare, and that's a terrible way to make an argument.

I was just trying to imitate what my 20-25 year friends did when they tried to report bugs in some software (not emacs, obviously, none of them use emacs and most of them even have any idea it exists). You have page which even worse. If that is “the main thoroughfare” then it's no wonder that emacs doesn't get many contributors.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 16:33 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I think a key thing that's going on here gets back to the idea that emacs is almost its own operating system. It has a mail client built in, and the hardcore developers use it as their way of accessing email. They naturally assume that anyone who cares enough about emacs to want to contribute to it will do likewise. It's a wrong assumption, but one can understand how they would make it. After all, every emacs developer they know works that way. They're so far outside the mainstream, they have no idea what the mainstream even looks like, and they are uninterested in finding out.