Re: Summary and next steps for (package-initialize)

["Clément Pit-Claudel" <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>]

On 2017-08-23 22:27, Drew Adams wrote:
> I still haven't seen an /argument *why*/ we shouldn't have users /opt
> in/ to turn on use of the package system. Other than the simple
> observation that some users have gotten confused about how to
> appropriately turn it on.

I can try to explain my position :)

I've come to consider package managers as a core part of a flexible text editor like Emacs.  I understand some people might not want to use package.el, or even any package manager — that's totally fine, and Emacs must work great for them.

But on the other hand, Emacs has now grown a very large collection of external packages: many features and programming languages are not supported out of the box any more, and instead need to be installed separately.  I'd like this to be as easy as possible.  Enabling the package manager by default is one way to do this.

I'd like us to give more visibility to Emacs packages, because I commonly run into people who use package in Atom or Visual Studio Code, but not in Emacs (and that's not because Emacs provides the corresponding features without an extra packages)

(Also: having the package manager enabled by default allows us to split some functionality out of core and into separate packages)

> `delete-selection-mode' is not turned on by default (but it should be). `transient-mark-mode' was not turned on by default for decades (it finally was, thank goodness, but only after a lot of time and debate). And so on. 

I agree with this too, and I see package.el as another feature that should be enabled by default.

Clément.