Re: What a modern collaboration toolkit looks like

[Eric S. Raymond]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>:
> And if you are hinting that using CVS is the reason,

Not exactly.  I think CVS in itself is *a* reason people sheer away
from the project -- selecting themselves out before you even notice
they're doing that -- but I think CVS is more important as a major
symptom and part-cause of the largest problem this project has.

That largest problem?  Boy howdy, did I get a faceful of it last night
at my friends the Matuszeks' post-Yule party.  They're AI researchers
and their parties attract a rather dizzying assortment of alpha geeks,
considering we're in Pennsylvania. People fly in to be at their
annual bash.

I proudly mentioned my work on VC-mode, and got majorly dumped on for
bothering with Emacs at all.  The kids out there think we're a
stagnant backwater, an old-boys club of bearded grognards that has
learned nothing and forgotten nothing for the last decade.

I'll also say I wasn't all that surprised at this reaction.  I've seen
this image problem building for a while; it's just that before I rejoined
the dev team I had little incentive to address it.

> > The Emacs project, though, is still operating at a scale and tempo I
> > think of as being typical of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I think
> > we are limited by poor tools, and by habits of thought derived from
> > those poor tools.
> 
> My analysis is different: I think we are limited by a small number of
> core developers, and by the lack of head maintainer(s) who could
> devote much more time than any of us can evidently provide to coding
> and leading the rest of the developers.

I don't disagree with you that either is a serious problem.  But I 
see all three issues (few developers, weak leadership, crappy tools)
as all causally linked and feeding into each other. 

In particular, crappy tools and weak leadership hinder attracting new
developers.  I can't solve the weak leadership problem, so I'm 
focusing on what I know how to do: fix the tools.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>