Re: Adding with-editor to Emacs?

[Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Sep 2, 2023 at 2:58 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > From: Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li>
> > Cc: stefankangas@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org
> > Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2023 20:12:40 +0200
> >
> > > Then I guess you should describe all those atrocities in detail, so
> > > that we could perhaps devise ways of handling it.
> >
> > I do not have a list of those atrocities and I do not have the bandwidth
> > and motivation to compile that in the next few months.  I have code that
> > deals with it though (with-editor-locate-emacsclient and the functions
> > it uses).  Using git to trace the history of that code, would give you
> > commits with explanations and/or links to places were the issues that
> > are being addressed were described.
>
> It's not that easy: AFAIU, with-editor was part of Magit, and was
> separated into a repository of its own not very long ago.  And the
> answers to my questions seem to be before the split.
>
> I also looked at the present code and found it to have quite a few
> non-trivial parts whose purpose I couldn't easily explain or guess,
> and which are not explained in the comments, either.
>
> So, if you have no time or motivation to describe the problems you
> tried to solve with that code, I guess someone else will need to find
> out and describe the problems in a way that we could then consider for
> inclusion.  I cannot myself afford digging through the Magit's Git
> repository to find the description of these problems, sorry.
>
> Or maybe Richard already knows the answers, since he thought this
> should be added to Emacs.
>

Just to put it out there, wouldn't putting the basic function in core
emacs, without all the workarounds for packaging fails, put the onus
on the packager to either adhere to the standard layout or patch their
distribution to make the function work accordingly?  That seems like
one of the benefits of a package being included in the core.

Lynn