Emacs project mission (was Re: "If you're still seeing problems, please reopen." [Was: bug#25148:])

[Perry E. Metzger]

Speaking more generally than just Debbugs...

On Mon, 18 Nov 2019 10:59:24 -0700 "John Wiegley" <address@hidden>
wrote:
> Like it or not, [the Emacs developers] get the priority right
> now. Being nice to new users is great, but until they become
> contributors and ease our workload, serving them can't be the
> priority.

Unfortunately, there's a potential negative cycle here. A certain
percentage of users of free software become developers. If we start
starving ourselves of users of Emacs, we end up becoming starved of
developers for Emacs, too.

I think the goal of the Emacs project should be to produce the best
possible editing/text processing experience for hackers,
period. (Well, best possible consistent with it remaining free
software, but that goal should be implicit in everything we do in the
free software movement.)

Part of that requires that Emacs "modernize"; not in the sense of
abandoning its essential Emacsness, but in the sense of making it ever
easier to write extension code, do your productivity workflows inside
Emacs, write software with Emacs, etc.

(But I've talked about that topic better in the two talks I've given
about Emacs in recent years...)

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger                address@hidden