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I think this is more inertia than anything else. It is pretty obvious that Stallman isn't the easiest person to talk to, but he has consistently put huge amount
by stiff 13y ago
I think this is more inertia than anything else. It is pretty obvious that Stallman isn't the easiest person to talk to, but he has consistently put huge amount of efforts into GNU for lots of years, and, whatever he did as the maintainer, seems to have worked out pretty much in the end. If there was anyone as active in the Emacs community today as Stallman was in his prime, they could easily push through changes despite Stallman's disagreement, via a fork or otherwise, but there isn't such a person, and that is that.
Consider that it has been almost 30 years since GNU Emacs started, for most of this time RMS has been the maintainer, and GNU Emacs continues to this day to be the most advanced, popular and active Emacs there is, while the various forks in existence like XEmacs, SXEmacs lost steam pretty quickly. So it certainly hasn't been all bad on his side.
- jedrek 13y agoThe popularity of a specific fork of Emacs is a moot point, it's the popularity of Emacs as an editor (or should I say, as a platform?) that is at issue. Stallman was active, how that he's not active he needs to either defer to people who are active or watch as fewer and fewer people take advantage of his work.
- stiff 13y agoStallman doesn't have much influence on Emacs development itself anymore, but Emacs is a GNU project, Stallman is still the head of GNU, and a move to another VCS would be a major organizational change. I too wish he would be less hard-headed about this, but lets not overblow this issue out of proportion.
- lstamour 13y agoIn replies, he says he doesn't oppose the move to git. Most devs who've replied support git. There's already a mirror. Let's not make mountains out of molehills...
- ams6110 13y agoOver those 30 years the emacs codebase must have moved through several revision control systems. Why is moving to another one such a big deal?
- kro0ub 13y agoBecause it's important to have a cohesive set of packages that are parts of the GNU project. It's about culture and cohesion, not just licensing.