Re: Some developement questions

[Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 12:50:54PM +0200, hw wrote:
>Ergus <spacibba@aol.com> writes:
>
>> 4) Many configurations available online like the availables on github
>> are very complicated with many dependencies, with too many irrelevant
>> details in some aspects; and the risk to become or being already
>> abandoned. If its creator is a C programmer maybe he don't need to
>> improve the python mode.
>
>Doesn't the package installer handle dependencies?
>
>
It depends of who created the configuration and how he did it. With ""require" we get an error not an automatic install, use-package fixes this.

But before that, the problem is to configure the package manager; add elpa and melpa, initialize... A new user doesn't know how to do that. Also consider the disadvantage that emacs is not default in any Linux distribution which represent a starting complexity level for new users and the wikipage is outdated specially about simpler basic aspects. That's the real reason why vim is winning young users and sadly emacs is not. The first impression.

For some packages the package manager solves some dependencies but not always because they could use multiple alternatives or may be used as a backend for others (for example smex). So the default is not to provide anyone.

Example: Jedi is a plugin for autocomplete, but company uses company-jedi and NOT jedi itself, company doesn't depend of it, but most company and python users may like to have jedi or anaconda, so the default alternative is not to provide anyone not elpy either; so a new python user will have the same experience like for example a notepad user until he learns elisp; in the packages manager jedi is not documented and it doesn't contain a link, in spite of it requires some not trivial configuration to set it up. So even if the new user had time, patience and abilities to configure and open the package manager, add melpa, install jedi, but not configure it or use autocomplete, nothing will work for him. This is very error prone.

Assuming that the defaults are always right is an unrealistic assumption. Many default options and packages are rarely what most of long time emacs' users like or prefer, so, how to explain this to newbies: vile vs evil-mode, the default C indentation is the gnu while 99% of the users prefer K&R, linux kernel or google's.

The excess of alternatives is also a source of confusion (gtags-ctags-rtags, company-autocomplete, flymake-flycheck, irony-rtags-ycmd, anaconda-jedi, Helm-ivy+counsel-ido_mode. smex-amx, package-paradox). Sometimes we need to think as new users not as developers or experiences users for the future of emacs.