[jeremyjh]

> So I think this has been blown way out of proportion.

If this has happened as described in the OP then I’m worried about the health of emacs. There was controversy before it was merged to master, and they merged it anyway. Breaking user workflows and not even making it optional, much less opt-in comes across as a callous disregard for user experience.

[nanny]

>If this has happened as described in the OP

It's not. The article is bad and wrong. It preemptively tries to dodge such accusations, but most of the hyperbole and "emotions" are just downright lies.

btw the person you responded to is the author of magit. I think his opinion should be weighted more heavily that the author of this article.

[rightbyte]

Ye once the devs go user hostile it is all down hill from there.

Especially in a project like Emacs, where every efficinado has their own really custom config.

I mean, reading the Emacs docs it is written in a way that make you feel like color display and a mouse is cutting edge hardware and optional.

It is a very conservative project ...

[tsimionescu]

But that is not what happened. The author of this article is misrepresenting the attitude of everyone involved. There was a single reviewer who noticed the patch and started engaging with it, Michael, and while he originally raised the concern quoted in the article, he discussed with the patch author and they finally got to a common ground, he suggested several other improvements that the patch author worked on, and finally he is the one who approved the patch to move further - in a process that took almost two months.

This is not to say that both the patch author and the reviewer didn't misjudge the importance of a workflow change. But no one was being hostile or dismissive - they discussed the issue, and concluded (probably wrongly) that the new behavior is overall better and wouldn't significantly impact anyone negatively.

Then, two days after it became available, other users started seeing it and raised bugs on the behavior, which the patch contributor started addressing. The author of this article was the first one to raise such an issue, and it wasn't initially clear how many others would agree with them. Still, the maintainers and the patch author agreed immediately that a flag to re-enable the old behavior would be a good thing, and asked if the article author would like to contribute it (the patch author wanted a break from this feature that they'd worked for weeks on). The article author came back with a patch that reverted all of the changes made by the original patch except for one. When told about this, they said that they only kept the changes that had any value, and that they'd require proof the other changes are also useful before going further - to which they didn't receive any more replies, for obvious attitude reasons.