Please help developing Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 20:44:41 -0700 (MST)
> 
> Would anyone like to do this?

Breaking news: Emacs developers need help!

There are lots of important things to be done, and too few people to
do them.  A few major new features, such as a switch to a
Unicode-based internal representation of characters and support for
bidirectional editing, are in initial stages of being developed.  Lots
of less dramatic, but still very important changes are awaiting their
turn.  On top of that, a gazillion of small tasks such as fixing bugs,
changes in wording or addition of index entries to the manual,
etc., need our constant attention.

All this is done by less than 10 core developers.  This small team has
just emerged from a year-long pretest of Emacs 21.1, which left in its
wake a large amount of changes that were deferred ``till after 21.1''.
We all have our lives, and cannot work on Emacs full time.

So when you see Richard (or someone else) asking ``would anyone like
to do that'', and you have some time to spare on that day, please
consider stepping forward and saying ``I will''.  For that matter, if
you see a bug report posted to gnu.emacs.bug and think you might be up
to the job, please volunteer to take care of that report.

If you never wrote or changed any Emacs-related code, and are not sure
in your abilities, pick up simple jobs at first.  An experienced
maintainer could do such a job in a few minutes, but when such tasks
mount, they add together to a significant amount of time, time we
could spend better working on more complex changes that are in the
queue.  By relieving the core developers from gobs of trivial tasks,
you will be making a significant contribution to Emacs developers; in
that sense, there are no ``small'' tasks.  There's place for any kind
of help; even tracking down a bug and reporting exactly why does it
happen helps a lot.  So don't let your lack of experience scare you.

Of course, many people on this list have enough experience and
knowledge to work on significant changes as well.  Please consider
investing an hour or so today, tomorrow, or any other day you like, to
pick some change from etc/TODO or from the discussions you read here
or on gnu.emacs.bug, and work on that.

Please help us develop new features and take care of bug reports at
the same time.

Today seems like a good day to start.

Thanks in advance.