"Some of the ideas found in these distributions may well merit inclusion in Emacs, but that does not happen."
1. Which ideas are they referring to exactly? Can't upstream something if you don't know what they want...
2. How do you even get approved to send code to FSF owned projects? I read somewhere you need to send a copy of your employment contract for them to determine you can assign copyright to them. But what are the exact steps? Who do you email? How do you exactly encrypt the file? What are the acceptance/rejection criteria? No seriously, somebody please make a beginners tutorial about this, I have no idea how to start.
3. Upstream Emacs releases once a couple of years or more, with no predictable schedule, can't blame anybody for wanting to stay away from upstream and have their setup under their control. But then again, I know of a worse offender...
There’s a healthy Emacs community on Reddit (r/emacs) where you can find answers to these questions and more, if you prefer that to the Emacs mailing list (which is the definitive place for such questions).
From what I’ve seen, folks on the mailing list do generally welcome & encourage contributions upstream (Stallman, especially) but it does sometimes take a little more effort to convince people about the value of a new feature/package, and then iterate on a solution so that it doesn’t break decades of accumulated use cases (the perils of success).
1. Which ideas are they referring to exactly? Can't upstream something if you don't know what they want...
2. How do you even get approved to send code to FSF owned projects? I read somewhere you need to send a copy of your employment contract for them to determine you can assign copyright to them. But what are the exact steps? Who do you email? How do you exactly encrypt the file? What are the acceptance/rejection criteria? No seriously, somebody please make a beginners tutorial about this, I have no idea how to start.
3. Upstream Emacs releases once a couple of years or more, with no predictable schedule, can't blame anybody for wanting to stay away from upstream and have their setup under their control. But then again, I know of a worse offender...
So... what should my next steps be?