Subject: Re: bug#48337: Fwd: 28.0.50; Emacs crashing randomly (possibly minibuffer activity related)

From: Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 May 2021 17:31:12 +0000

>> As I said to Eli a week ago or so: "So far I haven't seen a single 
>> concrete example that demonstrates that this feature is either (a) 
>> necessary in some circumstances (as was bidirectional editing support), 
>> or (b) not necessary but at least useful in some circumstances."  Does 
>> anyone have such a concrete example?  I'm all ears.
>>
>> It seems to me that the only benefit of this feature is a slightly 
>> different minibuffer behavior, that some users may perhaps find more 
>> convenient, as would be, for example, the possibility to display the 
>> minibuffer at the top of the frames.  Adding such a feature should not 
>> make Emacs 28 backward-incompatible in any way.
>>
>> This experiment started in a bad way: its purpose was to fix a supposed 
>> bug, which, as it turned out, was not a bug at all, but the result of a 
>> misunderstanding, namely that isearch uses the echo area and not the 
>> minibuffer.  From then on, more and more changes were added to Emacs.
>
> We are a diverse group of people with different interests in Emacs 
> development, each one scratching the itches that we have, which aren't 
> necessarily itches for others.  We should therefore all of us respect 
> the interests and motivations of others, even if they scratch itches 
> that don't look like itches to us.
>
> In this case, you have repeatedly stated your opposition to this change, 
> and nothing positive can be expected from expressing that opposition one 
> more time.  Can you please calm down and let Alan fix whatever breakage 
> he caused?
>

I'm very calm.  Indeed I opposed this change, from day one, as much as, 
and with the same energy as you opposed the change of the TAB key in xref 
in bug#44611 for example.

I will continue to do so until someone explains why this change is a 
"significant improvement" as you said, so significant that it's suddenly 
okay to introduce backward-incompatible changes in a central UI element of 
Emacs.  IOW, the "something positive" that can be expected from that 
opposition is an answer to that question.