Re: sqlite3

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2021 22:01:33 +0000
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Qiantan Hong <qhong@mit.edu>, rms@gnu.org,
>   eric@ericabrahamsen.net, cesar.mena@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>   luangruo@yahoo.com
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> 
> I question the wisdom of adding more inessential stuff to the Emacs core.
> To be perfectly blunt, it is bloat.

To be perfectly blunt, please leave that worry to Lars and myself.
That's why we are here, that's why we invest such an inordinate amount
of time working on Emacs (and on top of that, more time to participate
in this futile dispute).

> I'm not saying that sqlite shouldn't be added to core.  But I am
> saying it should be questioned carefully, particularly by people who
> are familiar with it (which I'm not).

We've examined that question and decided it could be a good idea.
Please bear with us, as there's no real reasons yet to seriously
question the decision.

> I feel sqlite has been added to the core, merged into master, with
> indecent haste, and without due reflection.

Your feelings are wrong, and disclosing them here is unfair.  You have
no real evidence to back that up, and without that it is just an
unfounded accusation.

The fact that both maintainers agree on this should already tell you
that you should check your feelings very well before you decide they
are justified enough to make them public.

> This cannot be good.  I think there are knowledgeable people here
> who are against this novelty and I think their expertise has been
> disregarded.  That cannot be good for the Emacs project.

Nothing was disregarded.  Hearing different opinions and disagreeing
with them is not the same as disregard.  Please don't accuse us in
crimes we didn't commit.

> In my mail program, mutt, I load my entire mail collection into memory
> every time I start it.  That's around 140,000 mails, it's over 2 GB, and
> it loads and threads in 7 or 8 seconds.  I don't know how long it would
> take to load into gnus, but I suspect it would be much longer.

What is the memory footprint of Emacs after loading those 2GB?  And
why do you want everyone to have to keep such large mail collections
in memory?  Not everyone has enough RAM installed to afford that.

> > I could of course try out the existing 3rd-party sqlite3 library 
> > for Emacs; it's not like there's a huge barrier here.  But still, 
> > that would mean adding a dependency that I don't currently have. 
> > Whereas if the facility were built into Emacs, the barrier would 
> > be lower, so I'd be more likely to experiment with selective 
> > loading of such datasets.  Presumably, the same argument applies 
> > to others' applications as well, and we'd have the further 
> > advantage that everyone would be using a common facility, so it 
> > could be improved collaboratively.
> 
> Yes, those are the plusses.  The downsides are the bloat (i don't know by
> how much), the dilution in Emacs's purpose (it's even less the "do one
> thing and do it well" than it was), and I suppose there might even be
> negative security implications (it's a database after all).  Also people
> will be forced to learn new tools, both inside and outside of Emacs.  I
> fear it will create another elite in the Emacs project, those who have
> mastered sqlite, similar to, for example, those who can read and write
> the cl- library.

There's no reason to fear this, no more than you'd fear that librsvg
will facilitate an "elite" who can "speak SVG" to create images, and
the "plebs" who don't.

Frankly, I'm amazed at the bru-ha-ha this change triggered, and keep
being amazed each day anew.  Who'd know that Emacs is such a
scandalous environment?