Re: PL support

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Mon, 11 May 2020 06:06:49 +0300
> Cc: cpitclaudel@gmail.com, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>     If there were ever some package we want to refer people to
>     but certainly would never want to move it into the core,
>     this issue would not arise.
> 
> We don't want to move every package to the core.

If by "we" you mean the Emacs project, then we don't actually have a
common shared view of this.  You evidently want to keep most of the
packages on ELPA, and maybe even move out to ELPA packages already in
core.  My opinion is almost the exact opposite, Stefan is in-between
(perhaps closer to your opinion than to mine), and there are a
plethora of other opinions.  these differences of opinion between us
are well known, and we are still debating.  In fact, at least for me,
we are now farther from an agreement than I thought, given the
copyright assignment controversy and the fact that we waive our coding
standards for ELPA packages.

> So I think deferring the step of asking for copyright assignment until we actually want to do the move to the core. We can track the packages without assignments the same way we've been tracking the "excepted" files in the repository.

We can maybe "track" them in the sense that we will know that
copyright assignments are not being collected for certain packages,
but in practice this makes it impossible to ever include such
packages, because getting the legal papers signed many moons after the
contribution becomes harder and harder as time passes.  We have live
examples of such difficulties, and had a lot of them in the past.
Given that experience, I don't see how we can in good faith expect to
succeed in getting the assignments in some distant future unless we
collect them today.  It sounds to me like burying our heads in the
sand.

> The clear benefit is the bigger choice of packages, vetted by us, and available for users to install right away.

Given that the proposal is not to ask for copyright assignment, the
coding standards are already "not imposed" but only "recommended"
(read: waived), and Stefan and others seem to say that even cleanness
of design and implementation and compatibility with the overall Emacs
design are out of our hands, I really fail to see what would be the
meaning of "vetted by us" in this context.  That "us" is certainly not
the Emacs project.  To me, it sounds like we are being asked to open a
MELPA clone, which makes no sense to me.