okay so the first question is what is an
example of a car
a package currently in
a non-elpa repo that does not work well
with Emacs
well one of them is s dot el
and this is what made me aware that
there was an issue here that caused
problems well s.e.l
is a beautifully written package
that appears to be very useful for
people
and there's just one thing wrong with it
it gobbled up the name space
of symbols starting with s dash
and I was shocked to discover that
somebody who had not coordinated with
the Emacs developers at all
had implemented a package using such a
short prefix which
isn't the right way to do things oh by
the way the questions have moved off the
screen this is no good I can continue
answering this one
but I'll be stuck when this one is over
anyway so uh
and I was told that there was nothing I
could do about it
that so many users packages were using
swl and thus essentially using that
definition
of the s dash star symbols
that any attempt to use them
publicly or privately for anything else
would lead to horrible problems
and I don't like that
I decided I wanted to do something
a so that that wouldn't happen again
and b to make it unhappen
in that case well the way to make it
unhappen in that case is with a new
symbol renaming feature the idea is
you rename that file to something else
and then you define an s.e.l that
sets up symbol renaming and then loads
the something else
so it actually runs the same code it
just
doesn't globally define the symbols
s dash whatever but they
appear to work for the programs that
explicitly
require that require sdl
or the s package so this gets the same
behavior for all the programs that are
using that library
and uh doesn't interfere
with the global name space at all
however to do that we need to have a
package
s.e.l that isn't the same
totally a short file that's totally
different
plus we've got to have the file that
normally is called
s.e.l available but
uh under another name well
how are we going to do that we can't put
this into
into Emacs in a nice way that
won't make the uh won't make the
maintainer angry
of the mate to the developer of that
package
but we can do it with non-gnu
elpa we can put those two things into
non-gnu elpa
without any difficulty and this shows
one of the advantages
we can put files we can put packages
into non-gdu elpa
and make changes in them now in general
we wouldn't
go to the effort of making big changes
that's just too much to do
unless something's really important but
small changes
that help things fit in are
easy to do and
uh okay oh so basically the recording
didn't get anything until now I just saw
a note pop up this session is now being
recorded
I hope it's been recorded all along it
would be a shame to
spoil oh good okay
okay good so uh that's one of the issues
uh does non-gnu eopa already exist
or is this a sort of quote plan I don't
know why you have to
put scare quotes around the word plan
it's sort of in between
it's the creation of it is started you
will find
that there is an archive that it's
possible to download packages from
and there is a repository to put them in
but that's not the way it's really
supposed to work
uh this is not supposed to be like the
new elpa where there's
one repo for all the packages and thus
anyone who wants to edit any of them
anyone that we want to have edit any of
them
has got to have access to the whole
thing for one thing
some packages will make
an arrangement with the developers
and they'll assure us that they will
do things as things should be done and
then we'll
have their repo copied automatically
or in other cases say
copied manually with a little checking
every so often
uh and then uh in
other cases we'll need to have our own
repo for a particular package
but we shouldn't have a single repo for
all the packages we should have a repo
for each package
so that the people working on that can
get access to modify it
this has to be finished setting up
and we're still working out the
procedures
for instance for making the arrangements
with the developers of a package so that
we can
we hope uh entrust its development to
them and
rely on them directly
and there may be more that needs to be
worked on
oh there's so many questions
well I hope you the third question is
what are the benefits
I hope that people now see the benefits
I've described them
uh next question is it possible to work
with the melba team
to integrate that into Emacs
no because the goal doesn't make sense
melba the way it's done does not belong
inside Emacs in any sense well first of
all it can't literally be
inside Emacs we don't have copyright
assignments for that code
and to get it would be unfeasible
but we're not asking for copyright
assignments for
non-gnu elpa so that's
you might wonder could melpa be merged
with non-venue elpa the problem is
melpa doesn't modify the packages
it's just a place to find releases of
packages wherever they happen to be
and they put packages in with
only a little bit of checking
so no we there are a lot of packages
that are
in melpa that we'd like to get into
non-canoe elpa I don't know the names of
most of them but I expect most of them
would be fine to have but they've got to
be looked at one by one
there are some rules for non-glpa
and the only way to check them is to
check them on one package at a time
and that's going to take effort
now with the people who work on melba
want to get involved
of this that would be great
I haven't tried asking them first we've
got to get this thing
set up I doubt they would want to
but if they said yes that would be
wonderful
uh any thoughts of packages being
added I'm afraid
um
I'm afraid any thoughts of packages
being added as
some url I don't know anything about but
it talks about open source
which means I'm very unlikely to have
much
in common with whatever they say about
either licensing or
what's right and wrong uh
but this seems to be something about
disregarding licenses
altogether well that is basically
asking to lose there are reasons
why we developed gnu licenses to release
software why we have criteria
for which licenses make a program free
software
if the program doesn't carry a license
or if it carries a non-free license that
program
is not free software now you can
maybe get away with disregarding that
fact uh unless
somebody an author or publisher stops
you
but we're not going to take we're not
basically going to
disregard the question of whether the
software we
recommend to people really is free
software or not
that's basically uh
blindfolding yourself to the legal
situation of the software you're
distributing
it's a terrible idea uh if they
disregard our licenses they will hear
from us about it
and if you want to contribute to the
free world
put free licenses on your code
and choose good ones to get this
information
look at gnu.org slash licensing
in particular slash licenses
and one page that input that's important
is license
dash recommendations.html
that's where we advise you on what
license we would recommend you use
depending on the circumstances
there's also license dash list dot html
which describes a lot of licenses and
says which ones are free
which ones are compatible with the new
gpl
it's really important to use only gpl
compatible licenses
so that the various programs can be
combined together
or linked and
you can also get other information about
gnu licenses
and the reasons why they are written the
way they are
oh sorry I don't see the next question
oh why do I insist on using per and
purrs
uh I'm not happy with using
they which is a plural pronoun with a
singular antecedent
it's bad because it causes
confusion that is completely gratuitous
many sentences become a lot of work
to parse and understand if you
add that ambiguity that source of him of
regular ambiguity now
I do not accept the demands of other
people
in regard to changing my grammar
you can try to convince me but
no one is entitled to give me orders
about that
or state their desires and expect
obedience not for me and not from you
or anyone we are all
equally entitled to decide
how we will speak and how we won't speak
now I've spelled out all of these points
in a file called stolman.org
articles slash
genderneutrality.html
of course this is not a gnu project
policy
it's my own personal ideas on the
subject
if any of you feels offended
by my referring to you with a singular
gender neutral pronoun feel free
to ex contact me privately
and explain to me your reasons
I will pay attention to them I'll
think about them assuming that they're
not something I've already
considered and decided to dismiss before
but you must not speak to me as if I had
no business not obeying you because
that's
rude and it is not likely to convince me
to change my mind
I believe it is not actually
of stating offense to anyone
and the fact that somebody disagrees
with me does not mean I'm wrong
but I always can be wrong
when you wrote that you could add a
package to non your new elpa
are you implying that you would add
packages with or without package
maintainers knowledge
of course the packages we would
we would distribute in this way are free
software
everyone is entitled to redistribute
them
and everyone is also entitled to modify
them
and redistribute them that's part of the
meaning of free software
I have been unable to understand
how there came to be an idea
that those who redistribute packages
have some idea to be mere
some obligation to be near mirrors
and not modify things themselves
well if a package is
being maintained by developers who are
cooperating with us
we'll normally just leave it to them
after all
we have lots of other work to do they
are
clearly experts on the packages they've
developed
let's leave it to them if they make that
sort of arrangement with us but
that's up to them we can't insist that
anyone make an arrangement with us
but since those programs are free
software anyone c is
free to redistribute them and we will do
that
have you ever used vi or vim or
evil mode no
are there any plans to implement
security considerations in non-gnu
elpa uh we probably
should and this will have to be
implemented
but at the moment
developer Emacs maintainers will copy
packages
into it and so as long as they are
verifying the packages and getting the
packages from the right place
that will take care of the security once
there is
when with automatic copying in
will have to do something to
make sure that we're fetching the
packages securely
and uh some of you might be interested
in
helping to design and implement this
system
uh what distro do I use
uh well which distro of gnu slash linux
do I use
I use tree scale
I haven't tried most of the free distros
and the reason is it's not crucial that
I do so
we don't need me to rate the various
free distros on
practical questions because anyone can
do that as well as I can
and so you can tell people what
you think of using them for me what's
important to me
is to inform people of the difference
between the free distros
and the non-free distros making sure
people are aware that if you
install a non-free gnu slash linux
distro you'll get a free operating
system with
non-free stuff in various quantities
added thus you will not reach freedom
although you you'll make a lot of
progress compared
with using for instance windows or
mac os or whatever vicious thing it
might be
I'd like to I'd like to people to be
aware
of this next step towards
getting freedom for yourself and your
own computing
so that you can do that if you want to
uh
so who gets to make the final decision
regarding
non-gnu elpa the
emax maintainers are going to be in
charge of this
but because it's not
just a technical decision it has with
only technical consequences
but in general unless there's some
severe problem with the package we will
want to put it in
and I expect most packages won't have a
problem
and we can just put them in when we get
to them
won't the elpa link to non-free sites
like github
uh it's a mistake to talk about a
non-free site
because a site is not a program
a program is either free or non-free and
we have
clearly stated criteria for that in
gnu.org philosophy slash
free dash sw.html we have the free
software definition
but a site well their programs on it
but it doesn't make sense to ask whether
the site is
free or not it's too simplistic a
question
to have a meaningful answer now one
thing you can ask about is does the site
send javascript to the user's machine
to the user's browser and if so is that
javascript
non-free well github
does send non-free javascript for some
operations
so we consider it unsatisfactory as a
repository
but uh that doesn't mean linking to it
for is a bad thing to do regardless of
what the purpose is
for instance if the purpose is to refer
to some things
that you can access without running the
non-free javascript
then it's okay for that purpose
so if now that you understand the
details of this issue
you think that there is a problem with
the
link to camel there's
sorry a link in camel dot html
well report it to
uh bug gnu emax reported as an Emacs bug
but do think about the criteria I've
just said because maybe it's not a
problem
is it okay to use the gnu of pharaoh gpl
for emax packages
yes it is
uh which is your favorite programming
language
if lisp which variant
well I don't exactly have a
favorite variant but
when I designed Emacs lisp I
did the best thing I could think of at
the time
subject to the need to keep it small
for the first few years it was important
for gdu Emacs
to run in a machine which could only
give it half
a meg of user space
so there are a lot of constructs that
clearly were desirable to include
that I left out because we could
make it work without them
and then a lot of those have been added
since because
it's been a long time since we needed to
keep Emacs so rigorously small
um someone is
asking about the
fsf's repository project well
we agreed that there would be another
virtual machine
running one of those for the gnu project
but that's as far as the discussion went
question 17 is extremely insulting
I have not engaged in sexual harassment
don't expect me to plead guilty to such
a
nasty claim
people have been accusing me of many
things
some of which are
basically mole hills and some of which
are false so
uh I'm not going to give them
anything I have been bullied in a
horrible way
that was wrong
I would like the bullies to apologize to
me
and when I see that they're not bullying
I will forgive them
I would like to have conversations with
them if any of the mole hills
annoyed someone I'm happy to talk
with her and thus
uh help help resolve things with peace
and my opinion on
quote diversity within
Emacs well Emacs is
never going to be diverse it is extended
in
one language Emacs lisp
well I don't know uh we did have an idea
of implementing extensibility using
scheme and the hope was that guile
could be integrated with Emacs that
turned out to be difficult it may be
impossible but in principle
it might be a good thing that would be a
small amount of diversity
but it's not that important
what I think is really important for
developing Emacs
is to make it do word processing
I sometimes use libra office
and yeah I can make it do things
it has features for wysiwyg which are
very nice
but it's in other regards
it's not Emacs and it doesn't have the
abilities of Emacs
and it should
so I urge people to work on extending
Emacs
in that direction adding the features
that a word processor has to have
the last question I can answer is
18 but yes it's a very sad thing
how many companies
insist on using non-free software
well I would get a different kind of job
that's a decision I made many years ago
early in the gnu project
I decided I would not first I would not
get a job developing non-free software
and later on I decided
once I could stop using non-free
software that is once we had
a gnu slash linux system that we could
switch over to and uh
oh wait I thought I thought magic wand
time meant it was time to stop
but now I rather ask the question
uh
so what do you do well if I were you
I'd probably not work for any of those
companies
if I needed to make money I'd get a job
but I get some
other kind of job
that didn't involve using software
I would or that let me choose the
software I would use
but I would live cheaply you know the
less you spend
the less you need to make and the more
time
you can take away from your paid work
and the more flexibility you have in
which paid work
you can do being in a position
to say no to avoid being
desperate to say yes
uh strengthens your position
and you need that one way you can help
do that is by
not having children now that is a
tangent but it can't be denied that
raising children is very expensive I
have heard
many people say that they are
uncomfortable with their jobs
but they have to do those jobs to make
enough money
to support their children
well think about that be aware
that's likely to happen to you before
you make that decision
what would I
what would I change about free software
well since this is
magic I would magically find
a way of showing everyone why
most free software needs to be copy
lifted
so that our community would not
basically
submit to abuse by proprietary software
developers
of course I could go further if I could
magically recruit a hundred thousand
good programmers to do lots of work
improving free software
we might well if we could do this 20
years ago we might have wiped out
non-free systems and then we wouldn't
have had
horrible things like
world wide web drm that
no one has the courage to resist
if they're desperately trying to get
money for anything
and if they need approval of companies
of the big companies that push for drm
uh then they don't dare even resist as
much as they can resist
and look what happened to the world wide
web consortium
uh they surrendered blatantly
and ignominiously by
endorsing the drm system
so what can you do I don't have a magic
wand
I'm a human being with the capabilities
I have
but the advantage of
great firmness in campaigning for free
software
and this enables me to do things
that no one else will do
what tools from pre unix days do you
miss
well I don't I don't think about them
with
missing them actually but
it was sort of nice to have
ddt as your login shell
so in using modern terminology
because that meant at any time you could
stop a program lotus debugging symbols
and start examining the data in the
instructions
you could debug it that way and then you
could even
patch in instructions to continue
running that job with the bug fixed
in fact you could even do this with the
system kernel
so that your jobs wouldn't get lost I
did that
quite a few times of course sometimes I
saw what was wrong and I just had to
fix a piece of data but sometimes
it took me a long time to figure out how
to get the system to
keep on going but with the work I had
done
I didn't want to lose that work
and so one of the first features I put
into gdu Emacs was
auto save
uh I'm not going to try to figure out
which packages I re I actually used
uh if I knew I would get hit by a bus
tomorrow
uh say because of a fortune teller
no a fortune teller doesn't give you any
knowledge it's just
superstitious uh hand waving
so assuming that I
talked that I got a reading from a
fortune teller which is
implausible enough to begin with uh
that wouldn't give me any knowledge
about what was going to happen to me
oh by the way fortune tellers generally
play back to you facts that they've
discovered about you
together with cold reading which means
they say things calculated to make it
appear that they know
more than they do or things that are
uh that sound wise to anyone
so you can say the same thing to
uh say 100 people
and 80 or 90 of them will say boy that
was really accurate
but what if for some reason
uh about
what what advice would I give for
stewardship of
Emacs well basically
focus on
keeping the community strong in
defending
freedom if you have a choice between
keeping the community strong in
defending freedom
and getting more people to participate
in the development
you've got to choose the freedom it is
very
easy for free software projects to
subordinate freedom to other criteria
and once that happens it's
easy for those who don't care much about
freedom
such as sometimes companies that might
offer you some money
to purchase your soul
not that there are really things that
exist called souls it's a metaphor but
it's an important metaphor for something
important
people in the community have to be
thinking about freedom
when they make decisions about what is
wise to do
the decision to devel to set up non-glpa
has a drawback it was a compromise now a
lot of people will
tell you that I am uncompromising and
say that that's a flaw
well they're wrong I make little
compromises
very often and occasionally I make a
medium-sized compromise
the compromise is in the past we wanted
to get
copyright assignments for the packages
in gnu
elpa so that we could move them into
core Emacs and of course sometimes we
move packages in the other direction
that way we are where we distribute a
given package
is something we can decide purely
technically
and however make insisting on getting
copyright assignments for all the
packages in gnu elpa
meant that we had to say sorry no
we will not install that packages in
packaging dewey lpa unless the
authors sign copyright assignments and
sometimes that's a lot of trouble
well non-glpa
won't require copyright assignments if
there's a free package
we can make whatever changes presumably
small otherwise we would probably say
we don't have time but and then
put it in but it does have the drawback
that
we in general we won't be able to move
those packages
into core Emacs without
getting the legal papers then that we
didn't get before
how do you see the future of gdu Emacs
uh I don't see the future
I used to say that my crystal ball is
cloudy today
unfortunately that has another
meaning which is quite ironic uh we
certainly don't want
our lives to be
somewhere in a cloud because
that clouds your mind and then people
start
cheating you and taking advantage of you
and it's horrible
but uh I don't see the future I just
can be sure from the past that there
will be
challenges where some of the people
involved want to make a big compromise
that isn't worth it
and they some they may even get the
impression that it's
up to them well actually
Emacs has appointed maintainers just as
every gdu package does and they are the
ones in charge of developing that
package
and this is for a good reason
because the appointed maintainers take
responsibility
to carry out the gnu project policies
and most important of all
are the ones that make the whole system
work together
and the ethical standards
to respect freedom and defend freedom
is there any plan to move more packages
from core Emacs into elpa
uh I don't know uh
whether there is a plan I suppose if
there's a plan
we probably would have done it if there
had been a plan
some have been moved I don't see this as
a
fundamentally important issue it's a
matter of what's convenient for
the users and their advantages and
disadvantages to each choice
what is your opinion on higher education
uh requiring non-free software for
instance
well I wouldn't I wouldn't
matriculate in a school which did that
unless I saw a way I could refuse
now of course I do this
because I can get away with it and
therefore my doing it is extremely
important to show somebody does resist
I don't expect most people who support
free school
who advocate free software to go that
far
uh I published an article in the spring
entitled saying no even once
is helping saying no to non-free
software
even once because
the more you do it the more you help but
even doing it a little in a way that
other people notice
is starting to help so
uh please don't think that your choices
are either
be as firm and stubborn as I am
or just give up and let yourself drift
helplessly as if you had no volition
there are a lot of points in between
there and you can surely
manage to say no some of the time
and show people an example of saying no
some of the time for instance you could
say to people
you know I hate the fact that my school
makes me
use zoom uh so whenever
I'm not being forced I'm not going to
use it
or I hate the fact that the only way I
can talk to that group of people
is resume but when
but for anything else I will feel better
about myself if I don't
see lots of ways to say no some of the
time
and yield some of the time
and when you try saying no occasionally
you may just develop the ability to say
no more often
now whether you would ever get to be as
stubborn as I am
I don't know but what I find is that
I like the fact that I've never made
this kind of compromise
I feel I have a reputation to maintain
nobody's forcing me but I get
satisfaction
out of maintaining out of being able to
continue to say
I will not
you are now unmuted and that also
can happen at various different levels
so you can get that satisfaction
of fully maintaining a refusal
that applies only to certain areas
citizens uh noon already let's maybe
take one or two more questions and then
break for
the lunch break okay thank you
how often do you personally use Emacs as
the
lowest question now uh
well I use it most of the day
I occasionally do use other things in
fact I occasionally edit with
libreoffice
I occasionally use media players I
occasionally
uh
I occasionally ssh to a machine and type
some commands on it
which occasionally includes running
Emacs on it
I read pdf files a lot
would be nice if you could get those
into Emacs so that I could read them
with Emacs commands
and I maybe even edit them with the max
commands
when they can be edited I use
uh journal sometimes
to write on a pdf file
are there any more interesting projects
you have in mind over and above
non-gnu elpa uh
I can't think of one right now well
there are things there are things that
the gnu project needs
doing there are packages that don't have
maintainers or could use
more maintainers uh
talk with maintainers at canoe.org
and the assistant candusences will
help you find a package where you can do
good
not for beginners though you got to get
you got to learn
uh a substantive substantial level of
capacity to develop and debug programs
before you can
be a maintainer uh have I ever looked at
maggot
uh no I haven't
but I believe
work is being done to get it put into
Emacs
and at that point I'll give it a try
I do not want to share my configuration
files
they're personal but
how about if we end this now
you are now unmuted sounds good to me
thank you very much richard for joining
in for live questions
okay