Re: Moving Gnus development to Emacs?

[Xue Fuqiao <xfq.free@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 8:29 PM, CHENG Gao <chenggao@royau.me> wrote:

> John talked about new trend to move more codes into ELPA.
> Maybe it's THE RIGHT WAY, to make emacs as emacs-core (with only bare
> functions) and all others packges (core as ELPA, third party as Melpa
> etc, or even PPA).

FYI - there were some discussions about this proposal earlier this year:

* https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-11/msg00212.html
* https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-11/msg00146.html

IIRC Atom is using this kind of architecture.  It has a really basic
core, and most of its features are available as packages, including some
very "basic" features, like settings-view (similar to `M-x customize' in
Emacs), find-and-replace, status-bar (similar to mode line in Emacs),
tabs (GUI tabs, not the tab character), language modes, etc.

But this approach also has its downside.  See the links above for some
related discussions.

> If package.el becomes APT like, that'll be cool, really cool.

What does this mean?  Command-line tools like `apt', `apt-get' or
`apt-cache' (or `apm' in Atom)?  If so, I think a simple wrapper script
to `emacs --batch' is enough.