Re: RFC: Adding BBDB to Emacs core

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Thomas Fitzsimmons <fitzsim@fitzsim.org> writes:

> "John Wiegley" <johnw@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>>>>>> "BB" == Bozhidar Batsov <bozhidar@batsov.com> writes:
>>
>> BB> You can add my voice to "I'd rather just have in ELPA (and we should be
>> BB> moving more and more packages there).
>>
>> Same here. I really don't want to see BBDB moved into core. I do want ELPA
>> packages to become more "first class" than they are now, so that the desire to
>> add such packages to core would no longer have the same appeal.
> Assuming (2) achieves all that, from the core maintainer's perspective,
> what's the difference?  The downside is they have two repos to deal
> with, and the interactions between the two to always consider (e.g., do
> we branch all of ELPA to match Emacs branches (probably not), or write
> all ELPA packages to work on any Emacs branch (probably), etc.).

There is actually a problem here with the way the ELPA is structured,
since it already uses branches for (some) packages. This is not going to
marry easily with the use of branches for something else.

> (Philosophical aside: I really don't want to see Emacs major releases
> become just an Elisp language runtime, class libraries and package
> management.  That would be sad.  Emacs is special, not just another
> language environment.  Package discovery via GNU ELPA (over the network)
> just isn't the same as feature discovery within the running Emacs
> instance -- there's always an extra level of annoyance, network access
> and configuration associated with external packages.  I'm hoping that by
> Emacs 27.1 I'll have a window manager in my text editor.


The hope would be not that a major release doesn't seen significant
advances in Emacs functionality, but that, those who want to, will be
able to track that functionality earlier as it develops.

Phil