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Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

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Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#31

Post by moosingin3space »

xenadu02 wrote: post #16
zeveb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > put a Code of Conduct in place for all communications on gitlab. > Sigh. This again? +1. Whenever I see a Code of Conduct I think, 'these people aren't going to be welcoming, and indeed there's a very good chance that they will slam the door in my face.'

That's the exact opposite of the intention of a Code of Conduct. Can you point out exactly what isnt welcoming about rules like "no racism" or "criticize code, not people"? Do you have a burning desire to call people "honkey" in code reviews? Can't live without calling people stupid for being old/young? Is being prohibited from stalking other contributors so you can call their workplace and get them in trouble a huge…

I agree with you. For a practical example, the Rust Code of Conduct has done an excellent job at being inviting. Even our community's most divisive arguments remain civil, which, as a side effect, means more discussion, so each others' perspectives are better explored.

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#32

Post by MichaelGG »

xenadu02 wrote: post #16
zeveb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > put a Code of Conduct in place for all communications on gitlab. > Sigh. This again? +1. Whenever I see a Code of Conduct I think, 'these people aren't going to be welcoming, and indeed there's a very good chance that they will slam the door in my face.'

That's the exact opposite of the intention of a Code of Conduct. Can you point out exactly what isnt welcoming about rules like "no racism" or "criticize code, not people"? Do you have a burning desire to call people "honkey" in code reviews? Can't live without calling people stupid for being old/young? Is being prohibited from stalking other contributors so you can call their workplace and get them in trouble a huge…

GitHub code of conduct actually is in favor of racism, if you're in the wrong group. Ditto for sexism.

"We will not act on complaints regarding ‘reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’"

That they even use the term "reverse racism" is telling. This is from a company that, in internal training, has anti-white material. "This is not work for white people", "biggest barriers to progress are white women". https://m.imgur.com/7YaVYUx?r

I don't particularly care, but if you're going to be inclusive, it should be technically inclusive, not loaded with politics. I'd bet there's a lot of people like me, thinking a egalitarian would be far less of an issue though I don't like curtailing expression, abrasive it may be, nor policing people in their personal lives.

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#33

Post by falcolas »

xenadu02 wrote: post #16
zeveb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > put a Code of Conduct in place for all communications on gitlab. > Sigh. This again? +1. Whenever I see a Code of Conduct I think, 'these people aren't going to be welcoming, and indeed there's a very good chance that they will slam the door in my face.'

That's the exact opposite of the intention of a Code of Conduct. Can you point out exactly what isnt welcoming about rules like "no racism" or "criticize code, not people"? Do you have a burning desire to call people "honkey" in code reviews? Can't live without calling people stupid for being old/young? Is being prohibited from stalking other contributors so you can call their workplace and get them in trouble a huge…

If you have to rely on a CoC to get your contributors to not "be jerks" and "be professional", you have other issues with your community which really need to be addressed first.

No CoC is ever going to stop a jerk from being a jerk. It will just prompt the jerks to work around it and cause even more headaches for the contributors. Worse, it brings about those who only want to criticize the CoC, either because it's too strict, or too lenient.

Taking the time to address critiques on a CoC is time taken away from actually developing on a project and building a community who cares about the project, not the CoC.

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#34

Post by MichaelGG »

flukus wrote: post #30
nprescott wrote: post #6

It sounds like the author wants basically everything about how Emacs is developed to change in order to better fit their ideas about what open source looks like. There are plenty of established projects that don't use a "pull request" workflow, Emacs only recently migrated to Git; I don't have the discussion from ESR around migrating Emacs to Git handy, but it was a pretty slow process to "bring Emacs into the 21st c…

Can anyone explain slack to me? It just seems like a shitty reinvention of IRC.

Doesn't require an IRC client, looks slick, has rich text, and integrations with other platforms. Biggest thing is that it doesn't need an IRC server. It could have been made with IRC underneath, but you'd want an intermediate layer to retain messages and so on.

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#35

Post by moosingin3space »

PeCaN wrote: post #4
falcolas wrote: post #2

> the vast majority of modern software developers do not want to use email as their communication channel Wait. What? I must be old school then, with my ~12 years of experience, because I think email is much more approachable than some of the modern communication methods. I create text and send it in an email. I get an email back. Repeat until complete. Or do people really think it's better to go out and sign up for…

Not just you. Age-wise I suppose I'm part of the ᶜʳⁱⁿᵍᵉ ‘New Guard’ ᶜʳⁱⁿᵍᵉ, but I consider email + IRC to still be really hard to beat in terms of low barrier to entry.

The Rust community, comprised largely of "New Guarders", is very active on IRC. It seems to me as though this community split is really an issue of a (relative) lack of developer community-building and marketing.

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#36

Post by 616c »

pnathan wrote: post #24
616c wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. This nice, but I have screwed around with open source for a long time. So, things like: > Ref: The "Tips" Appendix in the Emacs Lisp Reference. Example Novice (not me in this case): How do I get to that? > After you have downloaded the repository source, you should read the file INSTALL.REPO for build instructions (they differ to some extent from a normal build). > Ref: http://s…

> I am on the tail end of Linux/FLOSS culture, where a lot of people want more tooling and less learning To be honest, the 'less tooling, more learning' is exactly why I prefer the GNU culture. It keeps inessential complexity down. A lot of people are broadly in my side of the boat, and it's a major part of why we're here...

Some of us need tooling because we do not even know what to learn, or where to start.

Again, this on me. I listened to Wiegley talk, and wanted to get involved. I looked into one weekend, but did not follow up. I need to stay committed. I like the history and culture of GNU as an outsider, and this is why I wanted to get more involved in Emacs.

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#37

Post by moosingin3space »

falcolas wrote: post #2

> the vast majority of modern software developers do not want to use email as their communication channel Wait. What? I must be old school then, with my ~12 years of experience, because I think email is much more approachable than some of the modern communication methods. I create text and send it in an email. I get an email back. Repeat until complete. Or do people really think it's better to go out and sign up for…

> If this is the "New Guard", perhaps it's best they are scared away by email.

This isn't a healthy attitude to have toward an open-source project -- as a "New Guarder" myself, I would be very sad to see Emacs contributions dry up.

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#38

Post by vertex-four »

marssaxman wrote: post #22
xenadu02 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious or arguing insincerely? I can't tell. Codes of conduct are a direct response to ongoing harassment and stalking against various contributors of various open-source projects, followed by inaction on the part of the project maintainers or the excuse of "that just can't handle criticism". What is so offensive about saying "make it about the code, not about the person" and "don't stalk, dox, or harass peo…

I am completely serious and meant exactly what I said. I did not say that it was offensive; I said that I don't understand where the practice came from. I have never been part of an open source community where "stalking, doxing, or harassing" was a problem - or at least not a problem anyone talked about. It sounds very strange, and it's hard to imagine how people that immature could be capable of doing good engineeri…

A whole bunch of projects suffer from the issue - even (especially) ones as large as FreeBSD[0]. The issue usually winds up being that some minor contributor - or even just someone who hangs around in the dev channels - harasses some specific woman/trans person/other minority member, and the project has no official framework in which to approach this issue. Often in the project leaders' eyes, the project leader's job is all about code, not community management, leading to a call of "sort it out yourselves" when it's brought up to them - which is essentially a signal that the project will allow its contributors to harass each other without repercussion.

Basically - the sorts of people who women have to get conference organisers to have a quiet word with and/or ban don't stop being assholes on the Internet. If anything, they become worse, and it's easier to hide that behaviour when it winds up being in large part through private messages and communication systems other than the project's official ones.

(If you were associated with a volunteer group irl, and you started harassing your co-volunteers through Facebook and email and text messages, you'd hopefully be kicked out. Various CoC debates show that many people think that if the volunteer group is online, such behaviour should be excused.)

A Code of Conduct isn't magic, but it does provide social proof that the project leaders at least thought of the issues that can affect their contributors, and can provide a yardstick to judge whether a project is likely to at least listen about issues affecting contributors who are members of minorities.

[0] https://blog.randi.io/2015/12/31/the-developer-formerly-know...

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#39

Post by ciupicri »

xenadu02 wrote: post #16
zeveb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > put a Code of Conduct in place for all communications on gitlab. > Sigh. This again? +1. Whenever I see a Code of Conduct I think, 'these people aren't going to be welcoming, and indeed there's a very good chance that they will slam the door in my face.'

That's the exact opposite of the intention of a Code of Conduct. Can you point out exactly what isnt welcoming about rules like "no racism" or "criticize code, not people"? Do you have a burning desire to call people "honkey" in code reviews? Can't live without calling people stupid for being old/young? Is being prohibited from stalking other contributors so you can call their workplace and get them in trouble a huge…

What does professional mean, someone who doesn't say shit as mentioned in the history of the Agile manifesto? [1]

> This freedom from the inanities of corporate life attracts proponents of Agile Methodologies, and scares the begeebers (you can’t use the word ‘shit’ in a professional paper) out of traditionalists.

[1]: http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html

Re: Open Letter to the Emacs Maintainers

#40

Post by wtbob »

xenadu02 wrote: post #15
marssaxman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the "code of conduct" fad/trend, I don't understand where it came from or what problem it's trying to solve. I suspect that I might be sympathetic to their goals, if the "code of conduct" people did a better job of explaining them, but they just seem to take the necessity of this practice for granted. I therefore assume that the cultural conversation which produced the idea must have taken place in some ven…

Are you serious or arguing insincerely? I can't tell. Codes of conduct are a direct response to ongoing harassment and stalking against various contributors of various open-source projects, followed by inaction on the part of the project maintainers or the excuse of "that just can't handle criticism". What is so offensive about saying "make it about the code, not about the person" and "don't stalk, dox, or harass peo…

> A code of conduct is a signal that juvenile behavior won't be tolerated

Hardly: a code of conduct is juvenile behaviour. It's like when I was a little kid and drafted a huge constitution for my amazing awesome cool club — that was just me.

Adults don't need to write down a code of conduct, because they adhere to an unwritten code of conduct. Children whinge, 'you shouldn't do that, because this says not to!'; adults don't do that, because they know that they oughtn't — and they refrain from associating with others who do. Children want their clique to gang up on the people they don't like; adults simply walk away from those people.

Childhood is all about, 'you can't'; adulthood is all about 'I won't.'

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