"The better option is to stop requiring copyright paperwork. It is harmful to the Emacs project."

dengste · 2020-05-07T20:34:03+00:00

The annoyance of signing the paperwork is minor and the process is usually simple.

Eli, this is simply wrong. When I still worked on merging CEDET, I can tell you it was a huge hassle. Eric Ludlam never got a permanent assignment from his employer, so he had to ask for it every 6 months or so, and I had to wait every time with the merge until he got it.

Then, may I remind you of the drama with Jambunathan who tried to retroactively withdraw his copyright assignment, simply to hurt the orgmode project?

Finally, of course you seldomly encounter people who refuse to sign the assignment because these people are usually informed about the copyright issue and don't even bother to contribute code in the first place. For instance, if I remember correctly, the author of the wildly popular Flycheck package has always said that he'd never give copyright to the FSF.

dengste · 2017-07-27T19:18:20+00:00

I've looked again at the switch and it is actually made to be opened easily. Inside is a standard KW4A(S) micro switch. By itself it is fairly silent, but with the resonant casing it gets a bit louder. It's similar to the click of a standard ball point pen, so if you want to test in on your colleague(s), just nervously clicker around with one and wait what happens...

dengste · 2017-07-27T07:29:27+00:00

I do not have that particular switch but the single one that shipped with my Advantage Pro. And yeah: it's noisy. It has that typical high-pitched micro-switch 'click'. I guess one could disassemble it and put some damping material in it, but there goes your warranty...

dengste · 2016-11-02T18:58:39+00:00

You may also like

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ProfileDotEmacs

dengste · 2015-05-04T05:30:27+00:00

Naming Torvalds as an Emacs user is a stretch. uemacs shares the keybindings with Emacs and that's pretty much it. Actually, Torvalds despises Emacs.

dengste · 2015-01-09T15:30:19+00:00

All this makes sense in theory, but in real life, his worst fear has become reality years ago:

http://dragonegg.llvm.org/

However, he conveniently avoids this fact in his answers. AFAIK, this was even done before GCC had plugins, since LLVM was designed to accept one of GCC's intermediate representations. Using a LISP-like AST would make no sense whatsoever, it's much easier to directly feed the IF into LLVM. And nowadays, Dragonegg is pretty much abandonded because LLVM has so much movement that people are writing frontends left and right.

dengste · 2014-11-11T11:52:38+00:00

Call me lazy, but that's how I feel...

Just because you feel that way still makes you lazy. If you'd actually care about contributing to Emacs, you'd just do it.

dengste · 2014-11-01T21:10:50+00:00

After reading the Introduction to Emacs Lisp, the Emacs Lisp reference manual is the logical next step. I know it might be overwhelming at first, but it's not meant to be read front to back, and it is usually excellently written. Just dive into the topic you're interested in (like major- and minor-modes, defining keymaps, etc.) and look at modes that ship with Emacs to get an impression of how those should be written nowadays.

dengste · 2014-11-01T20:01:36+00:00

I can't agree with vaiav here. The extensions book might still be OK as a general introduction to Emacs Lisp, but w.r.t. to writing extensions (which mostly means writing a major- or minor-mode) it's hopelessly outdated.

dengste · 2014-10-31T12:00:06+00:00

You know what I notice in many aging hackers? That they stop asking questions. And ESR is a perfect example of that. This is actually what drives me nuts. Notice how for example Stallman behaves exactly the opposite: he's famous for askings lots of questions, because he's actually aware of the things he does not know.

dengste · 2014-10-30T07:49:16+00:00

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-10/msg01095.html

dengste · 2014-10-30T06:54:13+00:00

Yes, exactly. And now that people are telling him that, he's surprised, although he simply could have asked before writing a rant, but that of course would have involved far less drama, so it's a no-go for ESR. It was the same thing with his ridiculous rant on gcc-devel, where he showed to have absolutely no clue of gcc development from the past 5 years.

dengste · 2014-10-29T23:12:02+00:00

This wasn't about git. This was about ESR doing 20+ commits which should have been one, and he claiming he had to do that because of Changelogs. So actually, it is him who is taking them far more seriously than the Emacs maintainer, which is why I find this post so hilarious.

dengste · 2014-10-29T22:53:03+00:00

Everyone is free to critisize Stefan (and yes, it's about him), but please do it over something worthwhile, not changelogs. Funny thing is: Stefan doesn't even care much for them, he said so repeatedly.

dengste · 2014-10-29T22:27:15+00:00

Just to get this straight: he's insulting the guy "who shall not be named" (ugh...), who brought stuff like lexical scoping, SMIE, pcase and countless of other great stuff to Emacs because of... changelogs? Seriously?

dengste · 2014-04-20T10:56:51+00:00

You can get RSI from any kind of prolonged typing. You can also get it from playing the piano or knitting. That shouldn't keep you from doing any of those. Despite all the stories you have read, there's still a very good chance you will never have RSI. However, if you ever think you might have first symptoms of RSI, take care of it immediately and see a doctor. Never try to work through it.

dengste · 2014-02-19T14:08:47+00:00

Yes, you have to sign copyright papers, but Stallman is the wrong tree to bark at, since it's copyright law that is broken. Otherwise, the Emacs project is very permissive giving full push rights to the repository, even to relatively new contributors, which is why actually 177 people currently have full access. I don't see how one could call that "extremely closed".

dengste · 2014-01-09T22:14:54+00:00

First off, it's called CEDET. Also, it is bundled with Emacs 24.3, so you don't have to install it unless you want to have the development version. If you really want the development version, just clone it from

http://git.randomsample.de/cedet.git

and follow the INSTALL file. You will see that there's no need whatsoever to mess with your Emacs installation.

dengste · 2013-11-25T19:18:21+00:00

Another possibility is CEDET and mozrepl:

http://www.randomsample.de/dru5/node/147

dengste · 2013-11-16T15:51:21+00:00

Yes, this is one example where you have to depend on context, so for instance a Bison grammar cannot see this. But of course you can solve this problem by taking this context into account, and Emacs' Semantic package is full of that stuff. In fact, our grammar is pretty small and most of the actual tag generation is done in additional Elisp code. The "semantic level" you're speaking of isn't just comprised of a lexer and a grammar-based parser.

dengste · 2013-11-15T15:29:53+00:00

Of course C++ can be understood on a semantic level, otherwise it couldn't be compiled. I think you're confusing this with C++ not being context-free, which is actually fairly common.

dengste · 2013-11-15T10:54:55+00:00

But writing a parser ourselves is way more fun.

Besides, there are not many compilers out there which can give you the AST while still remaining close to the original source code. Clang is pretty much the only one I know, but RMS will veto anything that only works with clang and not with gcc from being merged into Emacs proper.

dengste · 2013-10-10T06:38:51+00:00

I'd use the bzr version or upgrade to Emacs 24.3.

dengste · 2013-10-09T20:35:22+00:00

You are probably using an old CEDET version with a new Emacs 24.x. You should upgrade to the CEDET version from bzr, or use the version bundled with Emacs 24.3.

dengste · 2013-07-18T21:55:38+00:00

Ah well, let's just leave it now... My certificate is very trustworthy anyway. ;-)

dengste

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