Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Miles Bader]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:
>> Yet a third is that when we decide to do it, we can converge on a
>> releasable state with almost absurd ease.  Like, Ivanovic (our release
>> manager) will announce "Point release scheduled this coming Wednesday"
>> and everyone will pretty much flip into bug-stomping mode.  The tracker
>> bug list tends to shrink dramatically when this happens -- not only do
>> we get prepared for release but *we know we've done so*.
>
> Eric, how well do you think this could work at all for Emacs?

I suspect that 90% of the difference in "responsiveness" between the two
projects has to do with the people (and numbers of people) involved, not
with the tools being used.

Emacs has a rather small developer base, and most of the developers are
fairly busy with other things.  A project with lots of developers that
are more intensely involved in development is naturally going to be more
reponsive.

Certainly the tools make _some_ difference, but I think ESR is
drastically overestimating how much of one.  If Emacs development were
at a faster pace (perhaps because the developer base change), then maybe
the tools would become a limiting factor, but I don't think they are now.

[BTW, one thing I think _would_ be very handy, and easy to implement,
would be an IRC channel for Emacs developers, just for those random
questions you wanna get a quick answer to sometimes... There's #emacs on
irc.freenode.net, but it's more user-level.]

-Miles

-- 
"Suppose we've chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we're
just making him madder and madder." -- Homer Simpson