It’s a shame most distros are still rocking emacs 27 and not including libgccjit makes installing 28+ a pain on windows.
What functionality in 28 do you need that 27 lacks? (curious)
20×10%
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: 20×10%
#32Idea for famous billionaires: support FOSS software and bug squashing streaks like this. It automatically ensues positive image and accelerates advancement of humanity in science and tech, especially for programs that are core to everyday life of developers, like editors. Someone tag Mr Musk.
I think you overestimate the positive image boon. The only people who would care about supporting free software are fairly techy, and they're likely either already Musk supporters or so anti Musk they'd only see the move in a cynical light. You can see this with Microsoft. Most people have no idea that "Microsoft Loves Open Source" is a thing. A few people seem to think Microsoft deserve the benefit of the doubt, som…
I think a lot of people have had their feelings about MS improved by their OSS contributions (myself included, and I'm not even a dev).
Of course it's not a binary thing for most people of flipping from "MS bad!" to "MS good!", some already liked MS and like them even more, some still hate them, still say "why should I trust them given their history / given they're not 100% lovely even now", but still surely a bit less hate than if they were still acting as they did 20-30 years ago.
I've no idea if my gut feeling is more or less right than yours, Id imagine companies as big as MS do actually do research to see how things like this affect public perception (not just for end users/businesses but also for tech workers), but I'm not aware of any research being made public on the PR benefits (or lack thereof) from contributing to open source stuff.
Re: 20×10%
#33My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would th…
I have a theory that if you did away with the "big projects" and just maintained a clean environment you would find that most of the big projects suddenly become "oh yeah, we could do that with a couple of scripts now"
It's amazing what we live with in tech debt and what a clean environment would enable.
Re: 20×10%
#34Re: 20×10%
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean the big tech companies rely heavily on these tools; surely they have the money to pay people a full-time wage, without using it as leverage to steer projects in their own direction? They owe it to the open source community; they built trillion-dollar companies on top of open source.
They don't "owe" anything to "open source community". The licenses under which the software was made available more or less states that. There are incentives to open source platforms so that they can build applications on top, support projects so that they can steer them etc. but they don't owe anything to the original developers.
I think the comment you're replying to is suggesting they morally owe it, the way you owe a thank you to someone who does something nice for you, not that they legally owe anything (example to demonstrate the type of "owe", not to suggest that a thank you is all that's owed). That's how I feel, at least.
Re: 20×10%
#36I didn't know this person before: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/category/emacs/ A banking CTO who contributes a lot in emacs. I really like the image editing he did. Thank you for posting this. Made my day.
He wrote the Gnus news reader. Many years ago I found a bug in it on a Friday morning, I searched around and found out how to report it to him, by the afternoon of the same day he had notified me of a work around!
Re: 20×10%
#37My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would th…
I've been at a few orgs that do this kind of thing and most have found it valuable - but it is a double edged sword that will need to be managed. For the time not specifically allocated to "fixing bugs" or "removing tech debt" or whatever choice of phrasing there is, the rest of the time there is a (misguided) implicit pressure to permit quality to drop to make gains in delivery because "we have time allocated to fix…
Yeah, our "gap sprints" end up just working on stuff we didn't get done in the regular sprints. Really nothing different.
Re: 20×10%
#38My previous employer used to plan "express checkout" weeks for developers. In between two larger projects, you'd get the chance to spend two weeks doing nothing other than picking low-hanging fruits off the bug-tracker tree. It worked miracles, with minor-but-irritating bugs getting solved much faster, and with features for niche groups getting implemented as opposed to laying in wait for a bigger project it would th…
That works as long as there's no scoring system, no leaderboard and won't affect your performance review at the end of the year, or you'll just create another version of the Cobra Effect. "The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, howev…
I know the story, but still find myself smiling everytime I read it.
Re: 20×10%
#39It’s a shame most distros are still rocking emacs 27 and not including libgccjit makes installing 28+ a pain on windows.
Debian has 28 in unstable, looks like there are some issues to fix before it can reach bookworm. https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=emacs
I used to build my own emacs, but after being annoyed with it breaking after each upgrade on unstable, I use the emacs-snapshot repo on http://emacs.secretsauce.net/ with bleeding edge packages for Debian sid.