On 2010-07-19 19:41, Štěpán Němec wrote:
All in all, I don't see any reason whatsoever to want to have one's package included into Emacs, and the "inclusionism" a lot of people seem to indulge in seems just ridiculous to me -- there's no point in having everything in Emacs core. In fact, a lot of current core libraries, including Viper, would make much more sense as external packages.
You have a point, of course. Actually, the very package that got me started with Emacs in the first place -- AUCTeX -- is not included as part of Emacs. Then there's the mentioned issue of "copyright significance" -- apparently, the threshold is somewhere at 15 lines.[1] I don't get how this is supposed to go together with distributed development, at all. Paradoxically, the more /successful/ a project becomes -- the more people get involved and contribute their time and (sometimes) huge chunks of code -- the harder it becomes to get the thing approved. (Of course, since we migrated from SVN to Git, it has become even easier for anyone to experiment locally and submit their work, fully credited, if useful to others. And that's really the point.) I don't see how open software can breathe and grow under these regulations. I don't understand the Free Software Foundation's stance on software freedom. If I have to choose, I'll pick an inclusionist stance on contributed code over an inclusionist stance on Emacs' libraries, any old day of the week. [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.vim-emulation/45/ -- Vegard