Re: ELPA and Gnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> JD> I tend to agree, but I dislike the fact that it draws a line in
> JD> packages: distributed with Emacs and not distributed with Emacs.
>
> That's a good thing.  Emacs is already very bloated.

I'm totally opposed to offloading things from Emacs, really.  With the
current development model, we're pretty sure that when an Emacs release
comes, all the stuff pretty much works, because it's been through the
strenuous QA process called "emacs-devel".

I can go to any machine that has Emacs installed and say (for instance)
`M-x grep', and I'm confident it'll work.  It won't work the same across
Emacs versions, but I don't have to download it on each machine, and I
know that I'm not relying on a bit-rotted elpa archive.

Any archive bit-rots, while something that's continually developed (like
Emacs) suffers from that a lot less, because it's all just there.

So as a user I hate the idea, and as a developer I like it even less.  I
just added a new command to Gnus that depends on org mode, and I did
that because I know that org mode is in Emacs.  If it weren't, I'd have
hacked up something freestanding, and that's just code duplication.

And it's not like the Emacs distribution is particularly large.  It
hasn't really grown much over the last decade, and disk sizes have
soared, so it seems even more pointless now.

Oh, and the way XEmacs bundled everything into packages was one of the
reasons I hated using XEmacs, before Debian sorted that nonsense out and
made the packages more or less go away.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen