Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:47:18 -0500
> Cc: abrochard@gmx.com, bugs@gnu.support, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>   > I wonder whether the survey stems from lack of vision of emacs
>   > admin and developers.  For instance, Gcc has a Development Plan.
>   > Suggestions for changes to the plan are discussed on the Gcc
>   > mailing list and can be approved or rejected by the Gcc Steering
>   > Committee. How about Emacs?
> 
> GCC has many developers who are paid by various companies.
> That makes it easier to make plans and actually carry them out.

There's another important difference.  GCC implements programming
languages defined by evolving standards that are developed by other
bodies.  The evolution of those language standards largely defines the
GCC development plans.  Other project, like GDB, Binutils, etc. have
similar traits: they support hardware and software standards developed
elsewhere.

But Emacs is its own standard, defined by what we put into it, it
depends very little on outside developments, and is only tangentially
affected by those external developments.  So those developments cannot
determine our plans anywhere near to how the next C++ Standard affects
GCC development, or the next DWARF2 version and various
debugging-related features in the next generation of CPUs affect GDB
development.