Jared responds to my comment on his database-mode, defending himself by blaming a lack of centralized documentation.
Now, I agree with this to a point. Documentation for third-party Emacs packages can be scattered and hard to come by. The EmacsWiki search is terrible, and shouldn’t be relied on. But in this specific case, I just don’t buy it.
SQL-mode is built in to Emacs, and Emacs is called self-documenting for a reason. All the packages it ships with have easily accessible documentation; even a cursory search of sql-mode should have shown that the feature he wanted already existed. For the record: In a SQL buffer, accessing the major mode help (C-h m) shows this in the very first sentence of the description:
You can send SQL statements to the SQLi buffer using C-c C-r.
Which just goes to show that it doesn’t matter how good the documentation is when people don’t bother to read it.
Now, this isn’t to say that it’s pointless to reinvent the wheel. You’ve got to learn to make wheels somehow, right? But my problems with database-mode run a little deeper than this.
On a personal level, I find it hard to trust the code of someone who can’t RTFM. If they didn’t bother figuring out that their feature already exists, what else have they overlooked? I admit that this is pedantic and unfair in some cases. But I feel the point has some validity: If you can’t be trusted with the small stuff, why should I trust you with the big stuff?
The other point I want to make is that forks like this hurt the community. The active Emacs developer community is pretty small compared to some other projects, so the available developer effort is small and precious. Spending it reimplementing features already available in vanilla Emacs seems like a waste to me.
Everyone has been guilty of this at some point, myself included. We owe it to ourselves and the community to do better.
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