Re: Tree-sitter maturity

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

On December 27, 2024 9:59:14 AM EST, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2024 08:46:06 -0500
>> From: Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>
>> CC: rms@gnu.org, manphiz@gmail.com
>> 
>> >> 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treesit-language-source-alist that is outdated?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users to do with such an outdated value?
>> >
>> 
>> Why not just vendor all the grammars with the Emacs modes that use them?
>
>We'd need to ask their developers to agree to this. 

Why? They're free software. For copyright assignment? Seems like an exception would make sense here.

> Other than that,
>I don't see how is that different from pointing to a specific version
>of each grammar: both will be outdated a short time after we point to
>the version or release Emacs with that version.
>
>So why do you think this is better?

Vendoring enables building a full featured Emacs without a network connection and guarantees build reproducibility in perpetuity.