From ngraves at ngraves.fr  Thu May 15 11:36:27 2025
From: ngraves at ngraves.fr (Nicolas Graves)
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 17:36:27 +0200
Subject: Status and onboarding for guile-emacs
Message-ID: <87zffdlwck.fsf@ngraves.fr>

(I couldn't find Larry's email, don't hesitate to forward him).

Hi Guile-Emacs,

I'm a donor and enthousiast for the project since I saw the annoucement
video at EmacsConf.  (I have the best intentions, I love your work
please don't take it bad).

I would like to make some feedback on the communication on the project.

I noticed several times that there were no feedback on the advancement
of the project, see for instance :
- [1] a Reddit thread
- [2,3] no feedback on timmy's valid (necessary for wayland) pull requests
- No logging of sent messages to guile-emacs-devel/discuss online
- No logging of the IRC channel to see if there's any activity at all

I'm not worried about a pause in the development itself, but I find it
difficult to believe in the project at all -- and thus donate -- when
there's not at least minimal feedback or onboarding of new people in the
project (I took a look but even with Larry's README partial rewrite,
it's difficult to properly get where one can be useful).  I know there's
a "small collective of workers", but it's unclear if this community is
opened, closed or idle.

Maybe we should spend a little more time :
- onboarding / making the collective / ensuring that those who want to
contribute like timmy and I can / are not ignored ;
- have intermediate goals clarified properly : It's daunting to look at
some distant goal with a lot of work while small successes towards a
bigger goal might be more motivating.

I also discovered schemacs recently (Ramin is in Cc), which approach
might be more welcoming to people from Guile : it might be easier to
first get the Guile/Elisp right, then the graphical part in Guile only,
and only then to try and bridge with Emacs without the C/graphical code
and all complexities that comes with compiling it together (small
successes towards a bigger goal).

There is progress there, maybe it could be a good thing to work more
hand-in-hand?  I noticed Larry contributed to both, maybe there's some
common ground to find?  (Although R7RS (is it the small version then ?)
might be too little for things like guile-fibers which would be very
welcome in the project IMO). 

(I want guile-emacs to happen dearly, thanks for taking the project this
far, and I'm happy to continue this conversation).

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1jnw3wu/is_gulieemacs_stop_developing/
[2]: https://codeberg.org/guile-emacs/guile-emacs/pulls/6
[3]: https://codeberg.org/guile-emacs/guile-emacs/pulls/7

-- 
Best regards,
Nicolas Graves