Re: [External] : Re: Concern about new binding.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Date: Fri, 05 Feb 2021 00:49:22 -0500
> Cc: eliz@gnu.org, kevin.legouguec@gmail.com, stefankangas@gmail.com,
>  spacibba@aol.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> More than that.  Over that time, how often have people
> asked for such a global binding?

We never bother ourselves with such questions; never did.  We consider
ourselves to be aware and familiar enough with the Emacs usage
landscape to make such decisions without polling users on each and
every step, because doing so would slow down development to an
unbearable crawl.  I always believed that at least part of the reasons
we were nominated as maintainers was that people trust us to be
capable of representing the bulk of Emacs users, and do it well enough
to avoid too many serious mistakes.

In a case such as this one, when one of the maintainers says "this
makes sense", I expect to hear technical arguments for or against that
(btw, only agreements were heard when the original decision in this
case was made), but I do NOT expect to hear "go ask the world because
you don't really know what you are talking about".

In all the 30 years of my uninterrupted active involvement with Emacs
development, I don't remember even a single instance of polling users
before making user-visible decisions.  (I may have missed one or two,
but it cannot be more than that.)  I'm astonished to hear such demands
now.  If this is indeed what's required from Emacs maintainers, I will
seriously consider resigning, because I cannot in good faith support
such ridiculous development practices, let alone such level of
mistrust towards my and Lars's experience and knowhow.