Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 4e23cd0 4/5: * mail/rmail.el (rmail-show-message-1): When displaying a mime message,

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 >   > but the problems Richard and Alan are encountering are soon
 >   > solved by those who study a little bit, and establish some
 >   > discipline in performing what they've learned.
 > 
 > Your tendency to belittle people is showing.

"Belittle"?  I stated a fact which applies to millions of git users.
I hardly think anybody will think less of you because I stated it!

You and Alan have made a choice to try to continue using a workflow
designed for a different tool, which is more or less incompatible with
git as distributed by its maintainers.  There's nothing wrong with
that if that's what you want to do, but you will experience problems
until either you establish a more adapted discipline, or you modify
your instance of the tool so that it is adapted to you.

I've exerted substantial effort both on- and off-list to suggest more
adapted workflows and to figure out how to implement the workflow I
now understand you to want.  The former is easy, but you rejected that
suggestion, and I found the latter rather difficult and the ideas
about implementation I was able to propose unsatisfying.  I
nevertheless hope my suggestions toward implementing your preferred
workflow will be of some use to you.

 >   > There's nothing wrong with wanting your tools to be adapted to
 >   > you, of course, but if you want to cooperate with others,
 >   > sometimes you need to compromise with the shared tools.
 > 
 > You have found an excuse to be callous about the trouble this
 > particular tool causes.

Tools that behave as designed don't cause trouble of themselves.
Misuse of those tools is what causes trouble.  I understand that you
and others think it is poor design, but I and many others disagree.

 > Do I see you gloating about it?  I think so.

Hardly.  I'm sad.  I'm not interested in seeing you or Alan suffer,
but despite all the Sturm und Drang, I still believe you would be
better off, and Emacs would be better off, if you had spent as much
effort on learning the tool as you have on complaining about the tool
and attributing ill-will to others who only wanted to help you learn
good ways to use the tool.  I'm sorry that we failed to understand
your requirements, but as often happens the people who best understand
the tool are enthusiastic and evangelistic about it.

I'm especially sad because Emacs Lisp taught me most of what I
practically know about working with linked data structures, and I see
many analogies between Lisp's lists and git's DAG that have been very
useful to me in understanding git.  I think it's very unfortunate that
the Emacs project has not been using git and exploiting those
similarities since it was originally decided to move to a DVCS.