Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Monday, December 21, 2020 at 10:23 PM
> From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>
> To: rms@gnu.org
> Cc: dimech@gmx.com, abrochard@gmx.com, bugs@gnu.support, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars
>
> > 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.

You may be correct, but we all have got an indication of what works better.
Emacs could word on setting some standard for the next three years and get
a bit closer to development plans that have proved to be much more sustainable.

But this is just my position.