Re: line-move-visual

[Wojciech Meyer]

Mark Crispin <mrc@panda.com> writes:

> On Thu, 10 Jun 2010, Uday S Reddy posted:
>> By community ownership, I only mean that all the people that have a
>> stake in the system have a voice in the matter and we all feel
>> ownership of the system.  When the community is divided, as seems to
>> be the case on this issue, the developers have to make a decision
>> and move on.

Well it is certainly possible, one can use mailing list and the NEWS
file, which was suggested before.

> This sort of thing happened in the past as well.  The difference was
> that there was accountability in the past that is absent today.

What sort of acountability, I think unhappy `customers' is enough
punishment.

> I have a new task on my list: replace emacs in the procedures for my
> target audience since emacs is no longer suitable for that purpose.  I
> simply can not tell these users "make sure that you set
> line-move-visual to nil"; they would have no clue what that means.
> More likely than not, I will end up being obliged to write a program
> for the task; and there will be one less way those users will be
> exposed to emacs.

What kind of Emacs users are they? Isn't possible to place on every
machine a stub containing: (setq line-move-visual nil).

>
> One of the advantages of the "software tools" mindset of the past was
> that you did not have to write a program for every task.  Instead, you
> could leverage the existing tools.  That falls apart when those tools
> are corrupted so that they no longer can be relied upon to produce
> predictable results.

It is ever more true now.

>
>>> But even the laymen become power-corrupted.
>> I think that is a bit of an exaggeration.  They have a
>> responsibility to bear and sometimes they get carried away.
>
> Every young programmer wants to put his own mark on things.  The
> problem is that these changes are frequently ill-considered and
> sometimes have bad consequences.

There is nothing wrong in being young and creative, that makes often
things better. Young people often do care more about things then Senior
Architects, they are also more flexible for changes.

The reason why this setting wasn't kept by default is to fix the
fundamental problem, without additional cost of keeping this setting
hidden. People have full rights to receive the fixes like this, as you
have full rights to complain about them. This is part of the game, IMHO
Emacs does not change that often, and really keeps things the same, just
because there is nothing to fix apart from things that need to be
changed in order to guarantee future of Emacs.

Wojciech