Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[chad]

On 18 Feb 2014, at 07:31, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>>> Incidentally, I say "change" and not "patch". Submitting a change these
>>> days generally means "clone, branch, pull request".
>> 
>> Sorry, I don't understand the subtlety.
> 
> I think it's a paraphrase of "real developers use GitHub", a service
> running on proprietary software and having a variety of commercial
> offerings, including a rather popular "take it or leave it" zero
> pricetag offering.

I think it’s a paraphrase of “lots of developers are used to a model where they 
submit changes that are taken, with or without modification, rather than a 
process whereby they suggest a change and then begin a dialog”. Github is 
definitely one of the promulgators of this model, but it’s certainly not the 
only one.

Without digging into real data (sorry), I’d say that around 33-50% of the 
changes submitted to emacs-devel from new people don’t land, either because of 
explicit rejection or because the effective hurdle is high enough that people 
don’t get over it. I’d further say that at least half of those failures to land 
result from platform-specific issues.  There are good reasons for the policies 
that create these hurdles, but they surely make it much harder for people to 
start working on emacs, even compared to other free/libre software projects.

I hope that helps,
~Chad