Subject: Re: bug#20968: 25.0.50; Be able to specify the output directory for `byte-compile-file'

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Jul 2015 11:24:40 +0300

> Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2015 23:48:13 +0100
> From: Artur Malabarba <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked], Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
> 
> > Those sites make our job harder.
> 
> In what way? 

Instead of having the discussions in a small number of well-defined
forums, that are reliably read by Emacs developers, and are archived
and indexed by the GNU servers, we have some of them going on
"elsewhere".  This produces annoying complications, including, but not
limited to:

  . There are more places to search when you are after some specific
    issue.

  . Issues that reveal Emacs bugs are many times not reported to the
    bug tracker, and remain unknown to us for many moons, sometimes
    years.

  . If and when people eventually do submit bug reports, they cannot
    be bothered to report all the details, and just provide a link to
    those "elsewhere" discussions, so whoever wants to fix the problem
    needs to read through them, which is not easy (the messages aren't
    sorted by date, etc.).

This becomes worse as time goes by.  I had my share of fixing bugs
caused by changes made years ago.  When that happens, you want to be
able to establish (a) why was the change made, and (b) what was the
use case or test case that served as the reason for the changes.
That's because whatever change you are going to install, you will want
to make sure it doesn't reintroduce back the original problem, so you
will want a good understanding of that past issue, and a test case.
Having to search 3 Emacs lists is already bad enough, having to search
in addition 2 stack-foo forums, which are not archived by dates (at
least I know of now way to search them given the date of the change in
Emacs) makes that unbearable, so I usually give up.

What's more, I don't understand why people use those places.  The
Emacs forums are quite friendly, so there should be no reason for them
to avoid us.