Re: Concerns about community contributor support

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

Hello all,

I've avoided saying anything in this discussion but not from lack of
empathy with the initial post.  Many valid points have been made in the
thread and I understand the frustrations.  My own view is that org is
now at a different stage than it was some years ago.  It is a
feature-full package which generally works well for a very *large* set
of use cases.  As a result, it is being used by many people and so is no
longer a niche product.

And, hence:

On Saturday, 17 Apr 2021 at 23:29, Thomas S. Dye wrote:
> But, my sense is that patches to Org mode proper will continue to be
> adopted slowly and deliberately.

and this is as it should be.  I *rely* on org for my work these days.  I
would not want the type of chaotic development we had in the early days,
development that would affect the stability of the package.  New
features need to be considered very carefully.

But, also, as has also been said: the "maintainers" are volunteers and
do have other things to do.  Stating that there is an expectation for
them to answer within a particular time frame is not fair.

If there is a feature *you* need that is not there, the beauty of Emacs
is that you can have that feature, if you have implemented it,
regardless of whether it is accepted in the main org package.  A large
part of my org environment is code that I have written myself to meet my
needs; my org specific config file is 3000 lines.  Some bits along the
way have migrated into org or have informed org features but I can work
the way I want to or need to regardless of whether the features are in
the main code or in my own config.

The excellent work that was done in creating version 9 (or maybe 8?) in
providing a wide range of hooks and filters means that practially
everything is customisable without requiring changes to org itself.

And this leads back to the first point: I want org to exhibit a certain
level of stability now as otherwise much of my workflow would break.  I
suspect many others have this same requirement.  And the maintainers are
very good at avoiding breakage when new features are accepted but this
takes time to evaluate the impact of those new features.

thank you,
eric

-- 
: Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50, Org release_9.4.4-254-g37749c