Re: Moving packages out of core to ELPA

[JD Smith <jdtsmith@gmail.com>]

> 
>> Because in ELPA, users must proactively opt-in to the use of the
>> package.  For such users — those who have actively sought it out — in
>> stark contrast to the vast majority of Emacs users, the benefits
>> dramatically outweigh the costs.
> 
> The other side of this assertion is that users must opt-out of loading
> packages in core, and therefore that the entire lisp directory (bar
> obsolete) is loaded into every Emacs session at startup, which is
> clearly untrue.

I know some inexperienced users have this concern, but I don't think anyone here believes that.  I also do not worry for one second about the 1,007,028 bytes **/idlw*.{el,texi,info} occupy, since downloading them takes <<1 second.  No, the costs I see are not related to unwanted bytes, neither bytes on disk nor bytes loaded into the running emacs process.  But reasonable people can disagree about the scope of these costs.  Disabling the auto-mode-alist and moving the manual from the top level would go a long way towards mitigating them, IMO.  

I am of course not myself an emacs maintainer, but I would be interested to hear whether everyone who is agrees that maintenance costs are "strictly zero" for seldom-used code. 

Thanks for your thoughts.