>and can't understand why you would need refactoring tools
>to rename a method, because in his C-style world a search
>and replace should be sufficient.
Is that really the underlying reason, or are you making it up ?
From what I've seen, he doesn't want to expose internals of GPL software such that non-free software can be built on top of it, which is a fair stance to take - even if you and I might disagree to it as it as a consequence might prevent our life to be easier/better - at least in the short term.
The direct and inescapable consequence of this is that he makes things more difficult for other GPL (and non-GPL-but-free) software, just because maybe some closed-source software might do something with it in a day and age when they can already just use clang.
Dying on this hill makes him a bad steward of the projects other people have entrusted him with (and fortunately the maintainer of the Emacs debugger stuff is ignoring him), while also making everybody else's lives suck a little more.
Is that really the underlying reason, or are you making it up ?
From what I've seen, he doesn't want to expose internals of GPL software such that non-free software can be built on top of it, which is a fair stance to take - even if you and I might disagree to it as it as a consequence might prevent our life to be easier/better - at least in the short term.