Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  johan.myreen@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2024 23:00:16 +0200
> 
> Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:
> 
> > The proposal I'm quoting is straightforward: if Emacs is compiled with
> > tree-sitter support, enable the modes and warn when the grammars are
> > not available. If Emacs is not compiled with tree-sitter, do neither.
> 
> This sounds like having external grammars is a UX problem.

It is a UI problem because users could have a TS-enabled Emacs, but
not grammar libraries for the language(s) he/she wants to edit.  The
problem in that case is how to present this situation to the user.

> Are they so big that they cannot be included?

They are not large, but they are written in C or C++ and are developed
by their own teams in their own repositories.  They are also a lot
when taken together (e.g., my personal collection includes more than
70 grammar libraries, and even what we have in core needs almost 20
different libraries).  So we cannot distribute them as part of Emacs
source tarballs.

If you are talking about what downstream Emacs distros do for
packaging, that's a separate issue on which we have no control.  But
if a distro packages grammar libraries, it could also enable the
corresponding modes in their customizations of Emacs.