Re: Confused by y-or-n-p

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: eliz@gnu.org, rudalics@gmx.at, juri@linkov.net,
>       drew.adams@oracle.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2021 01:33:57 -0500
> 
>   > Three out of five Emacs maintainers have now weighed in (at some length,
>   > in total), that they don't think your proposal would be helpful in
>   > practice, so I think it's time to let this go.  
> 
> We can't "let it go".  A combination of our practices adds up to a
> system that will install some UI changes without having much of a
> discussion about it.  And then, once they are released, it is "too
> late" to argue to revert them.

I don't think the above is a balanced description of the reality.  We
have a single incident, or maybe a small number of them, where the
process failed to spot a problematic change in time for it to be fixed
before the release.  So we are fixing it later.

That's not what the "system" is, that's a rare exception.  Mistakes
happen, and will continue to happen, no matter what procedures we will
install.  Let's not exaggerate the significance of a single incident,
and let's not draw drastic conclusions from it that blow the issue out
of proportions, because that never leads to sound decisions.

> There are many ways we could fix this, but we need to fix it.

The problems are rare, so the proposed solutions should not unduly
complicate the existing process, which in the vast majority of the
cases does work, and works well.  I invite you to read the NEWS for
the few recent releases looking for behavior changes that have a
documented way of disabling them, and for changes that are opt-in to
begin with.  _That_ is what the "system" produces, not the one or two
rare exceptions.