Subject: Re: bug#31597: 27.0.50; Annoying ' to ’ translation

From: Alan Mackenzie <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 May 2018 19:33:53 +0000

Hello, Eli.

On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 20:42:53 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 27 May 2018 17:12:17 +0000
> > Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <[email-masked]>

> > > > The person behind the change, Paul Eggert, simply pushed it through
> > > > without first securing agreement from Emacs as a whole, and had the
> > > > political skills to prevent a consensus on the matter prevailing.

> > > This misrepresents what Paul did and say, and I think is grossly
> > > unfair to him.

> > This was a highly controversial change.  Paul could first have committed
> > the changes on a branch and invited comment.

> Saying this is a far cry from accusing Paul in nasty political tricks
> and in deliberately sneaking controversial code behind our backs.

He sneaked in this code in front of our noses, but none of us really
appreciated what was going on.  I certainly didn't (until later).

> > You weren't really involved in the fight against this.  I was, and it
> > exhausted me.

> I hear you, and you should know very well that I'm not too
> enthusiastic about this change, either.  But we should be able to
> disagree without name-calling.

It was me that rolled with the punches.  Soon after this thing started, I
committed an "emergency" user option to allow people to disable this
forced character substitution.  Within hours, this option had been
"polluted" so as not quite to work.  And shortly before Emacs 25 was
released, the option was quietly degraded to a non-option variable, which
one of the manuals said was for "advanced use" only.  This is the sort of
manoevering I was up against.  (The option is now back in Emacs 26.)

> > > I wish we avoided such ad-hominem attacks, just because we disagree.

> > Eli, my view of things is NOT an ad-hominem.  An ad-hominem is when one
> > argues by attacking a _person_.  My paragraph above does not do this: it
> > criticizes Paul's _actions_.  I think it is a fair summary of what
> > actually happened.

> The wording you've chosen to do that is what I hope we could avoid.

OK.  But I don't think it's healthy to pretend that the above didn't
happen, and that everybody is kind, considerate, and respectful to
everybody else all the time.  I don't think either of us want anything
like this to happen again.  I would hope that, in future, all
controversial changes get argued out first, and if committed to the
repository, they go on a branch first.

And the OP, Helmut Eller, deserves an explanation of how the current
state of affairs, which he has reported as a bug, came about.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).