Re: OFFTOPIC: Where do you get your elisp?

["Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

I think the current state of elisp archiving is pretty sad. The elisp user
*and* developer communities badly need the equivalent of Perl's impressive
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (or CPAN). 

To answer your question, I get my elisp almost exclusively from the
gnu.emacs.sources newsgroup, but I'm always missing articles since I don't
have time to read news as often as I would like and my news server expires
articles too quickly for my reading habits. (Does anyone know of a searchable
archive for gnu.emacs.sources on the Web?)

I see a lot of novice elisp developers implementing the same features that
others have implemented in the past. Countless times I have seen someone post
to gnu.emacs.sources some elisp code that they just spent days or weeks
writing only to have someone followup and tell them that somebody else wrote
the same thing two or more years ago. The result is that a lot of elisp
development energy is wasted because there is no good archive of elisp
packages! If elisp code isn't incorporated into Emacs (or XEmacs) at some
point, the code is often forgotten and dies, especially if the author doesn't
routinely post updates and/or continue enhancing it. I think it's a major
problem for the Emacs community, but nobody else seems to care.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time or resources to fix it.