[OS X Emacs] Re: opening old mac files (CR end of line char)

[xah lee]

Dear David Reitter,

i started to answer your letter paragraph by paragraph, but after a  
few tries, finding the activity really silly. I began using online  
forums daily since 1991, and started to use newsgroups about at least  
once a month since 1995, and perhaps you too, have similiar long  
experience using online forums and knew well the nature of online  
debates among male geeker forums. Perhaps we do not want another  
rather fruitless argument? If i want to know about software social  
issues, i can study economics, psychology, political science, or even  
ancient human literature, which interests me, and, in my opinion, are  
foundations of understanding and decision making for contemporary  
social issues than at least online forum argumentations that we see  
perpetually and perennially in online male tech geek forums.

if i do answer in detail, am afraid sooner or later the thread'll be  
out of control.

you wrote:
«You, as a general user, use software that is being provided free of  
charge, by people spending a lot of their own time. What do you bring  
to the table?»

this is rather a damning stroke, don't you think?
I have parried your stroke before it touched me though, please see:

Responsible Software Licensing
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/responsible_license.html

The Condition of Industrial Programers
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/it_programers.html

i've written few other essays in the past pertinent to our subject.  
They can be easily found thru the above URLs if any parties are  
interested. This shall be my last say on this subject here. (if  
anyone brings this to newsgroup comp.emacs, then we are more free to  
argue there.)

Thanks.

PS in recent weeks i have mixed up a few names here. I like to take  
this opportunity to correct it. (1) It was David Kastrup, not David  
Reitter, who posted in newsgroup gnu.emacs.help about the cause of  
the problem (html-mode with require-final-newline), however David  
Reitter also participated in the thread. (2) A message posted by me  
few weeks ago about modernization of emacs... i mixed up David  
Reitter and Adrian Robert (author of Aquamacs and author of Emacs.app).

   Xah
   xah at xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/



On Dec 5, 2007, at 4:51 PM, David Reitter wrote:

On 5 Dec 2007, at 21:05, xah lee wrote:
>>
>> You should write a good bug report to mailto:emacs-pretest- 
>> bug at gnu.org, possibly with a copy to mailto:help-gnu- 
>> emacs at gnu.org – your two points are sensible enough.
>
>
> This i consider a propaganda.
> I have written a somewhat detailed account on my opinion on this  
> issues. You please see:
>
> The Bug-Reporting Attitude

> There is a common behavior among people in software geek forums,  
> that whenever a software is crashing or behaving badly, they  
> respond by “go file a bug report” as if it is the duty of  
> software consumers.


I mean, much can be said about software developer's attitude towards  
taking responsibility for their own code, but it's a fact of life  
that software contains bugs, and the fewer people are involved in  
reviewing code, the more bugs there will be.

You, as a general user, use software that is being provided free of  
charge, by people spending a lot of their own time.
What do you bring to the table?

Your requests for changes are duly appreciated, but in general, what  
users can contribute to the software is to file good bug reports. It  
takes up a lot of time to read bug reports, reproduce them with a  
minimal case and trace them to the module that's causing it, and then  
formulating a useful bug report to the Emacs engineers that can then  
deal with it.

If you've got a bug to report of suggestion to make, even if it's as  
a result of the discussion on this list, then please formulate it in  
the appropriate forum to the best of your abilities. You don't even  
have to engage in the subsequent discussion.

I don't think that's too much to ask.


☄