If you are offering to write code to do some of these tasks that's great. If
not, then the danger of making the discussion so general is that it detracts
from the specific proposals and nothing gets done. I think the priority must
be first to use a modern bug tracker and VCS for Emacs development.
Integrating these and other features into Emacs are more substantial tasks that
can be done when volunteers are found.
It's good to have priorities.
My point was simply that an IDE is (often) more than a disparate collection of utilities. Emacs has a set of powerful utilities, but when a user sits down to Emacs and opens up a C/C++/elisp/whatever source file, s/he just gets that file.
In other IDEs (Eclipse, Kdevelop, MSVStudio, whatever), there's a wider array of functionality presented to the user: build system, class browsing, bug tracking, etc... If a goal is to make Emacs development attractive to new folks, one way
might be to make Emacs present more of an IDE. Why do people like
Kdevelop, MSVS, Eclipse, etc.? I don't really know - I only use Emacs,
I'm just saying it might be useful to take a step back and think about
it.
The discussion regarding VCS and bug tracking is great, and I'm sure that'd help both emacs-devel and to attract newer developers.
As I said in each of the previous email, I'm not telling emacs-devel to run out and implement an IDE framework, but instead, just think about it - MAYBE it is something that emacs-devel would find useful to use.
From the discussion, it doesn't sound like people have taken a step back to see what might be changed about emacs-devel in a long time, and ESR's initial email was a good catalyst. Perhaps someone will think about other IDE functionality and be inspired. If so, great, if not, no big deal. But to shut your ears to even thinking about it b/c I haven't ponied up resources to do something (that hasn't even been proposed)...
TJ