Re: Imports / inclusion of s.el into Emacs

[Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>]

João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:

> Yes.  As they join the GNU Elpa flock, we cleanse them of the evil, brother!

;-)

Personally, I'm not convinced there's a strong need to rename it.  But
I think it's important that any rename would be agreed upon by the
current module author.  The worst possible situation would be to have
a "better" name but a maintainer that feels alienated.

It's my impression that we've had a number of cases where we
successfully got a package into GNU ELPA, only to have it fall out of
sync with development within a couple of years.  We've recently
discussed that our copy dash.el is out of sync with recent
development, and we have coffee-mode.el before that.  Stefan Monnier
said in relation to this that: "Other work to do is to make sure the
GNU ELPA packages don't become stale.  E.g. `dash` is out of date,
IIRC."

Is there something we could do to avoid such a situation before it
arises?  To my mind, we really need package authors to push
(figuratively speaking) their changes to us, rather than us having to
pull their changes.  We seem to lack the necessary manpower to
constantly "chase down" package authors or do the work to merge
changes ourselves on a consistent basis.

And as we are working to get even more packages into GNU ELPA, which I
think we should, this problem will only tend to increase over time.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas