Re: Moving packages out of core to ELPA

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: JD Smith <jdtsmith@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:03:05 -0500
> Cc: emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> git log --pretty="format:%an" lisp/progmodes/idlw*.el doc/misc/idlwave.texi | perl -ne 'chomp; $a{$_}++; END
> {foreach $n (sort {@a{$b} <=> @a{$a}} keys %a) {printf("%30s\t%s\n",$n,"+" x $a{$n})}}'  
> 
> This reveals that an impressive 39 individual maintainers have had their hand in the code over the last 20
> years, some with more than 80 commits.  Yes, many of these are find/replace typos or other "no additional
> cost" commits, but many are not.

You consider 4 changes a year a significant maintenance cost?  Please
don't, because it's negligible.  I consider even 4 changes a day not
too many.

Look, why won't you two leave it to the maintainers to assess the
costs of the maintenance, okay?  You are both arguing about something
you know only in theory, at least when applied to Emacs maintenance.
I know this from practical everyday experience, and I'm telling you:
the costs are negligible.  Why isn't that enough? why do you insist on
telling me what are _my_ costs?

This discussion shouldn't have continued after the question was asked
and answered.  We are wasting each other's time by keeping it going.
Let's move on, okay?

My conclusion from this is that we can either move IDLWAVE to
lisp/obsolete (and remove the relevant association from
auto-mode-alist), or leave things as they are.  Which one is better is
up to the users of IDLWAVE (and I'm okay with either one), but either
way the maintenance costs are not a factor.

Whether to move IDLWAVE out of core to ELPA could be revisited later,
but the maintenance costs definitely don't justify moving it nor
leaving it; they are simply not relevant to that decision.