Re: Tree-sitter maturity

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>
> Cc: Xiyue Deng <manphiz@gmail.com>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2024 10:54:29 +0000
> 
> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > If we add something like this to Emacs, there is an issue we need to
> > take care about: to make carefully sure that it does not install
> > any nonfree grammars.  I don't know how those grammars are released,
> > ir by whom, or how much they care about free software.  We can't
> > take for granted that they do.
> >
> > Perhaps we could check automatically that the grammar found is properly
> > licenses, and disregard any grammars that are not free.
> >
> > By contrast, if grammars are going to be packaged and released for
> > distros, and chosen for installation by users, then it is the user's
> > responsibility, not Emacs's responsibility, to reject the nonfree ones
> > (and the GNU/Linux distro might insist on that).
> 
> It might take a while for that to happen, which is why I still believe
> it would be better if tree-sitter major modes would populate
> `treesit-language-source-alist' on their own, and point to the specific
> checkouts that the major mode developer tested their implementation
> against.

We could have done that, but there's no way we could keep the value of
treesit-language-source-alist up-to-date, because the grammar
libraries put out new versions much more frequently than Emacs
releases, especially if you consider libraries that have no official
versions at all (in which case we can only point to some revision in
their repository).

The question that bothers me is how useful is it to have
treesit-language-source-alist that is outdated?  What do we expect the
users to do with such an outdated value?