Re: [Nano-devel] What's up with chris, and how to move forward

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Chris,

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015, at 20:09, Chris Allegretta wrote:
> I've found myself to more and more be in the position of trying to keep 
> nano static, keep the featureset more restrained, keeping consistency 
> with things like flag names and behavior at the expense of new or better 
> functionality.

Do you hear what you're saying?  You stand in the way of *better*
functionality?  Even you think that some additions would provide
better functionality, and still you prefer to keep nano static?  :)

> I do feel like there's a very silent majority of folks who just use nano 
> (including myself :-)) who don't want nano to change toooooo fast from 
> version to version.

But what has changed between 2.4.2 and HEAD (what would become 2.4.3)?
Fourteen small bugs were fixed, ten tiny improvements were made to how
things look in certain rare error conditions, and four new functions
have been added.  Surely you can't have any objections against fixing
bugs or improving error messages, so it must be the additions that
bother you.  It can't be the option --unix, because you yourself kind
of suggested adding it.  So it must be either savefile, findprevious,
or cutwordleft -- or all of them together.  But... these additions
will be *invisible* to the average nano user, to those who never read
'man nanorc' or 'info nano nano rebind'.  But they can much improve
the user experience of those who are willing to rebind some keys.
So what is the problem with them?

> nano has absolutely become more than I'd ever imagined, which is great. 
> However, every new feature suggestion or non-bug patch feels so onerous 
> or unnecessary to me as a result

Well...  If I had been nano's maintainer over the past ten years,
I would have said no to libmagic support, would have said no to
linter support, would have said no to formatter support.  :)
The reason?  Too much code, and for very narrow areas of use.
Whereas things like savefile and findprevious you are likely to
use in nearly every session.  And they cost very little code.

> I'm really 
> not being fair to letting nano grow and thrive and really should step 
> out of the picture.

Yes, that would be good.

>  At the same time, I've never really encountered 
> anyone who shares enough of my vision to just step away completely.

Ah.  But what you want there is for someone else to keep nano static,
to take the hard and stifling decisions in your place.  That doesn't
help nano grow or improve.

> maybe there is some solution to this which 
> is not obvious to me.  We should definitely try changing things up,

What occurred to me first: find three package maintainers who together
are willing to take over stewardship of nano.  Any change or addition
must get the approval of each of them.  And I say package maintainers
because they are likely not to look only at their own preferences but
instead mostly at what would be good for their users.  So... Eitan,
Mike, Jordi, Kamil...?  What do you say?

Benno

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