Distributed Maintenance for Emacs (was: is there summary of template systems for emacs?)

[Leo]

On 2008-12-14 21:37 +0000, Xah Lee wrote:
> I really feel sorry emacs's user base is dying. The most important
> thing i think is to get emacs to use modern terminologies and be
> compatible with the minimum of standard modern UI.

Users are not scared off by Emacs's UI. It is more important its
functionality.

And in order to boost its functionality a few orders more and better, it
needs a good development model, a model that supports *DISTRIBUTED*
maintenance.

A huge system like Emacs can not simply and effectively maintained by a
handful of maintainers.

Currently there are many successful models to follow, here are a few
examples:
R with CRAN,
Perl with CPAN,
TeX with CTAN,
Python with PYPI (http://pypi.python.org/pypi)
......

particularly R, it has a high-profile core team that maintains and
develops the core of the system while it has thousands of maintainers
for its 1628+ packages. I recommend you to have a peek at them at
http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/web/packages/.

This way R has a high-quality core that is suitable for INDUSTRIAL and
serious work and it has thousands of high-quality packages maintained by
their authors, ready for bug reports and feature requests. This is key
to user satisfaction.

RMS's thinking is, the number one reason that users come to free
software is because it is free. However, free software is free only if
your time is worthless, someone once said. I just spent 10 minutes on
this post for the better or worse of Emacs.

To sum up, I think you have not caught the key problem in Emacs.

Bye,
-- 
.:  Leo  :.  [ sdl.web AT gmail.com ]  .: I use Emacs :.