1999 open Emacs bugs | Hacker News Reader

1999 open Emacs bugs

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

85 pointspama11 comments

Been reading Lars' bug hunt logs since it started and its amazing. Guy retired rich and instead of lazying around or doing vain publicity/philanthropy he chose to develop and maintain Emacs, all out in the open. Almost all the bugs fixed are also not his own. As a newbie Emacs user I reported a bug and Lars investigates and fixed it within couple of days! Real cool guy and we're quite lucky to have him around.

He's amazing and reading his blog the other day prompted me to update my already kinda recent Emacs (I last build it in february 2022) to the latest master release.

I haven't found out why yet but apparently Emacs now compiles faster too. On my 3700X / 32 GB of RAM I now get, using make -j 16 bootstrap 1m30s for the non native-compilation and 2m30s for the native-compilation version (which is the one I use). That's down from about 4 minutes six months ago on the same machine: I think something changed that makes compilation faster.

Yep, that was Lars' doing as well. He ran like 1 years worth of Emacs builds on every commit to see where the big jumps occurred, dug down and fixed regressions. There were other people helping too, but I remember Lars being the driving force behind the endeavor.

Yeah, the "Total Emacs Bugs" chart is amazing: https://quimby.gnus.org/circus/stats-emacs/stats-emacs.html

> Guy retired rich

Damn, didn't realize that those Pterodactyl Gnus mugs sold so well.

That was fun read, thanks!

For future reference: https://www.gnus.org/stuff/pterodactyl/pterodactyl.html

how-to guide on building and then contributing to Emacs:

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2014/11/13/welcome-new-emacs-de...

Builds on a Mac M1 fine, just had to brew install texinfo. However, M-x package-install is giving me a "no file or directory, package" error and I haven't used Emacs in forever, so I have no idea what it could be.

> according to my education in financial analytics, there are no technical barriers until we reach 500.

For those unfamiliar with technical analysis, it has been called "the astrology of finance."

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/09/01/w...

Lars is a hero and a huge inspiration. Emacs is too important to drift into obscurity and it’s due to people like Lars that Emacs is not only kept alive but getting better and better.

„take one out, patch it around, 2002 open Emacs bugs”

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