On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 06:20:34AM +0000, ndame wrote:
> Let's take the kill ring. It's a central piece of emacs, yet I don't see any keyboard
> based solution built in to browse and search the kill ring. M-y is extremely basic. There is
> a menu, but it's mouse based, inefficient.
> 
> There are external packages, of course, but I wonder if there should be a builtin way to
> navigate and search the kill ring from the keyboard. By builtin I mean a package available
> from at least elpa.

Hm. Doing "M-x package-list-packages" and searching there for "kill" yields a few
hits, among them:

  browse-kill-ring  2.0.0   available  melpa-s... interactively insert items from kill-ring
  easy-kill         0.9.3   available  gnu        kill & mark things easily
  kill-ring-search  1.1     available  melpa-s... incremental search for the kill ring

(and several more; DISCLAIMER: I haven't tried any of them).

Perhaps one of those could fit your needs? Or be a starting point?

> Is there a current policy which governs what features are integrated into the core (elpa) 
> and what features are left to outside developers?

The only formal hurdle is the copyright assignment papers [0] (if you
want your code into Emacs or Elpa; there are alternatives). And if you
trust the FSF, this hurdle is minimal.

The informal hurdle is getting your stuff out there, maintaining it,
and convincing people that it's worth it having a look. Easy stuff,
really [1] ;-P

Cheers

[0] https://www.fsf.org/licensing/assigning.html/?searchterm=copyright%20assignment

[1] No, just kidding. And reminding myself of the nearly infinite debt
   I'm in towards the free software community.

-- tomás