[AUCTeX-devel] Re: Changes in font locking

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup writes:
>
>  > people without write access just get ignored, abused or both.
>
> Nonsense, as a quick look at a few XEmacs Beta threads will show.
> Quite obviously the bugs themselves and the reporters' demeanor have
> a huge amount to do with it, write access or not very little, and
> very few reporters receive cross words, and even fewer are ignored.

This problem has been reported in the past by both Gnus and AUCTeX
developers in a civil manner, and ignored.

> Ralf dug up the information that I asked for, as well as very useful
> information about Emacs that you also chose not to get[1], and he
> got the desired result.

The time it would have cost an XEmacs developer with a checked-out
copy to come up with the relevant information using vc-annotate would
have been one minute.

I find it amusing that you accuse me of deliberately not looking for
information you did not ask for (the additional info Ralf dug up about
Emacs), while steadfastly refusing looking for information within
XEmacs that you get asked for, for the purpose of being able to find a
fix for XEmacs.

Talk about double standards.

> Your bluster, on the other hand, is a lot of sound and fury,
> signifying nothing except your frustration.  I felt sorry for you,
> and more so for the actual users, but as long as I was under the
> impression that getting into the guts of copy-syntax-table was
> required, to me it wasn't worth the time I estimated it would take.
> I have better things to do.

Well, if you and other XEmacs developers have better things to do than
fixing bugs in XEmacs, why should this work be done by people not even
using XEmacs?

> Time constraint and bug triage is just an unfortunate reality in an
> open source project staffed by a declining number of volunteers.

You don't seem too concerned about that decline.  At least I can't see
much to encourage otherwise.

> Footnotes: 
> [1]  In fact you incorrectly claimed the opposite, which was important
> -- it made it seem that the use of copy-syntax-table was a deliberate,
> XEmacs-specific change, meaning that the hairy internals probably
> would be relevant.

You should really at some time start supporting your claims about all
my evil-doings with actual quotes.  I made no claims about the history
of this code: that was the reason I asked for an XEmacs developer to
use vc-annotate or its equivalent for looking for it.

I certainly assumed that the change originated in XEmacs (after all,
we received no reports for this problem on other platforms), but I
don't remember doing any _claims_ warranting this kind of
chastisement.

If you actually accompanied your accusations with actual quotes, this
would put things better in perspective for the reader.

-- 
David Kastrup