Re: Netiquette is way to go

[Po Lu]

goncholden <goncholden@protonmail.com> writes:

> Come on now.  I worked in England, the United States, and France.  Do
> you really think they conquered the world by being nice?  Perhaps when
> inside their own country.  Everywhere else, it doubt that very much.

None of us on this list (hopefully) aim to conquer the world.

> I will tell you about netiquette.  There has been a tendency for
> prescriptive and rigid advice based on personal ideologies, rather
> than listening about the struggles of users in whatever difficulties
> they are encountering.  When one is telling time and time again about
> an unsolved problem, why do maintainers continue to forcefully insist
> that it makes no sense to disable automatic indentation or automatic
> re-indentation?  One time these things did not exist and people
> managed their projects quite well even then.  But now people have got
> so used to them that they have become totally dependent on them.
> Their world view has changed so drastically that if someone else wants
> to do it differently, it must surely be nonsense.

Because you did not ask about automatic indentation.  From the point of
view of everyone except you, you were asking how to adapt the Emacs
Fortran indentation rules to your (legacy) code, and not how to disable
automatic indentation.

Secondly, I cannot understand why changing the indentation around the
location of edits is a problem at all, even with code written on
"legacy" machines.  Many years ago I worked on ALGOL 68 written in
Russian in the 1970s and 1980s, and indentation did not prove to be a
problem at all.

> How can you speak of netiquette when the real problems are not raised
> on the agenda, falling into a spiral of silence.  To put it naively as
> a pessimist conclusion of what will happen in spite of protests here
> and there in that we will probably continue to slide toward some kind
> of apocalypse awaiting large catastrophes to awaken us.  I don't
> accept any optimism when somebody tries to convince me that in spite
> of all the problems there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  My
> instant reply is yes and it's probably another train coming towards
> us.

[...]

> Please understand this, you will not ever find a global common and
> acceptable style of communication.  But learn to accept all forms of
> styles of communication.  This is why I have continued the discussion
> that got us to an understanding of the automatic processes within
> emacs that have to be disabled so I can do what is needed.

I don't think we try to find a "global common and acceptable style of
communication"; people are simply asked to be nice and to behave with
the amount of courtesy generally expected on the internet, which happens
to be very similar to what is expected in western Europe.

> Go ask many people and tribes across the world (e.g. the Massai ) if
> they want to move to america, the uk, or russia.  They would say,
> definitely not, never.  In the international theatre, there are no
> rules to say that we must play the game with your rules.

The internet is not run by the Massai.