Re: [Nano-devel] Comment/Uncomment feature patch

[Benno Schulenberg]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016, at 14:32, Mike Scalora wrote:
> I apologise for giving an impression of discarding anything.

Accepted.  :)

> It is pretty hard to pick up how this group/team operates and values
> different tradeoffs and how homogeneous those values are across the group.

There is no homogenity.  Chris would like nano not to change at all,
apart from pure bug fixes.  Mike would like the input system to work
like readline, for example.  I just like to make things look better.


> "casual users" vs. everyday users

The casual users may report a bug now an then, but for the rest
they will find everything they need, I think.  It's the everyday
users that post feature requests.

> non-TINY file size vs. functionality

You mean keeping the binary small versus having more functionality?
Well... nowadays tininess doesn't really matter any more -- what is
the smallest SD card you can get?  4GB?  In the times of floppies
it was relevant to have an editor with a real small binary, but not
anymore, not when the smallest laptop you can buy has 2GB of RAM
and a 500GB disk.

> BDFL vs group consensus

Chris is the dictator, but a very lenient one -- I get to do what I
like most of the time.  :)  Consensus there never is.  As noted
above, everyone has different wishes, a different focus.

> 7-bit ascii email vs. html formatting

Email is text; it should be possible to read it without any hassle
with something as simple as 'more'.  Nobody said anything about
7-bit.  These are the times of UTF-8, even terminals are able to
render many scripts.

> meta-discussion (like this) vs. brevity

You can discuss all you like, but you won't find many who have
the time or willingness to participate.  Mike and Eitan mostly
have other things to do, and when they speak, it will be brief.
Chris and Jordi and Kamil have even less time.  Then there are
a handful of others who occasionally comment.

> tradition vs. improvement

Improvement, for sure.  But there are two kinds of improvement.
First, fixing bugs and making things smoother/easier.  And second,
adding functionality.  The latter happens now and then, because
Chris simply puts in the features that he wants (linter, formatter)
or I put in some small things even against the misgivings of others
(killword, savefile).  But all this while respecting "tradition", of
course: the default behavior and key bindings of nano must not
change.

> Has the idea of a "contributor guide" ever been discussed?

Not that I know of.  We have so few contributors that that would
hardly be worth it.  In the two years that I have been committing,
we have had two major contributors.  Mark Majeres, who brought the
undo system into working order and put colors on nano's face, and
Mahyar Abbaspour, who made that window resizing now works properly.
You are the third who has come up with a significant patch.

Benno

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