Re: Tree-sitter maturity

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

On December 27, 2024 7:40:19 AM EST, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> 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treesit-language-source-alist that is outdated?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users to do with such an outdated value?
>

Why not just vendor all the grammars with the Emacs modes that use them?