One idea would be to change flymake so that it can support flycheck

backends natively, without needing any third-party packages.  That would

already go a long way to decrease the differences between the two

packages.  I'd definitely encourage work on that.

Another thing is that we could use a good built-in macro to define

flymake backends.

Perhaps Steve Purcell (added to CC) could be convinced to contribute his

excellent flymake-flycheck[2] and flymake-easy[3] packages to core?

This would kill two (or more) birds with one stone, and also remove some

of the gripes that some users have with flymake.

Yup.  Historical kerfuffles notwithstanding, more collaboration and

interoperability can only help, whether or not that means that the

friendly competition[1] between flymake and flycheck remains or not.

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Flycheck is a package that's well-written, popular, well-maintained, and

> that respects the users's freedom, so there's no reason not to include

> it in NonGNU ELPA, regardless if it comes with some bridge for Flymake.

Agreed.

> But I'll grant you that it's not 100% orthogonal: If we want to get

> a uniform interface between the two, the first thing to do would be to

> encourage cooperation rather than to put up barriers, so including it in

> NonGNU ELPA could help.

Yup.  Historical kerfuffles notwithstanding, more collaboration and

interoperability can only help, whether or not that means that the

friendly competition[1] between flymake and flycheck remains or not.

One idea would be to change flymake so that it can support flycheck

backends natively, without needing any third-party packages.  That would

already go a long way to decrease the differences between the two

packages.  I'd definitely encourage work on that.

Another thing is that we could use a good built-in macro to define

flymake backends.

Perhaps Steve Purcell (added to CC) could be convinced to contribute his

excellent flymake-flycheck[2] and flymake-easy[3] packages to core?

This would kill two (or more) birds with one stone, and also remove some

of the gripes that some users have with flymake.

Footnotes:

[1]  If it hasn't always been friendly in the past, there's no reason not

     to work on making sure it's friendly going forward.

[2]  https://github.com/purcell/flymake-flycheck

[3]  https://github.com/purcell/flymake-easy