Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Dec 31, 2007 2:24 PM, Miles Bader <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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.

I don't think there's anything in Emacs that makes its developers
inherently more "busy with other things", other than, perhaps, age.
And then we go back to Eric's points about the Emacs' project
(relative) inability to attract young developers.

> Certainly the tools make _some_ difference, but I think ESR is
> drastically overestimating how much of one.

I think Eric is perhaps overestimating, but OTOH many comments in this
thread seem a bit underestimating to me. The truth is, we don't have a
crystal ball, and neither does Eric; we won't know unless/until we try
it. But he's right that other big projects seem to be doing better,
from a responsiveness POV. Now, every time that issue has been brought
to discussion, the answers have centered about Emacs having few
developers... So back to the previous point.

> [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.]

Which goes to show how different people's priorities are. IRC would be
to me the less interesting of Eric's proposals. But I know there are
projects (Subversion, for example) which make use of it with good
results.

In case I'm not making myself clear, which is likely: I agree with
most of what Eric has said in this thread. Even if we cannot now
estimate whether switching tools would be a 5% or a 500% gain in
productivity, there's the almost certainly that there would be a gain,
and Emacs would make a step towards attracting more people. No, I
don't have the numbers to back up that; it's a hunch, like most
everything else said in this thread. But the simple fact that the
discussion about bug tracking software, alternatives to CVS, etc.
springs regularly in this list it's itself significant.

             Juanma