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I think a more effective approach to getting this reverted would be to actually describe the problem for people who don’t know what registers are, and to include the reasoning for the change, so that people can actually weigh the pros and cons and form an opinion.

I also think you can leave out the names of individuals, you can discuss the idea on its merits without their identities being involved. All it accomplishes is demonizing people who donate their time to the project. Already this thread has people saying stuff like “I don’t like this person.”




People who don’t know what registers are aren’t affected by the change, so it’s not clear why they should be weighing in.

And criticizing a person’s decisions doesn’t amount to “demonizing”.


This article is accusing maintainers of pushing a bad change. It was immediately obvious that there was only one side of the story being told here. And lo and behold, there was a lot of missing context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=38592984&goto=item%3Fi...

and individuals involved have been receiving harassment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/18f5oi9/comment/kcss...


The actual reasonable approach would be to implement it as a strictly opt-in feature for the next release and then when many people have tested it, gather some some usage data and then decide on whether to make it the new default behavior or not.

Just breaking established user behavior and muscle memory just because you think something might be better without having gathered any actual evidence is insane.




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