Re: org-export raises stringp nil error

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > > If so, I have no idea why you came to the conclusion it's a failed
 > > experiment.
 > 
 > Because many (most?) users want the whole deal.  As one Stephen
 > Turnbull says on this page:
 > 
 >   http://www.xemacs.org/Releases/Public-21.2/projects/sumo.html
 > 
 > and I quote: "The packages are popular, but the typical user of the
 > core tarball wants the kitchen sink."

Yeah, I already mentioned that in this thread, too.

It doesn't mean that separation of core and packages failed, because
there are *ongoing* advantages to a package system that can be updated
at one's convenience.  It means that *people who are installing XEmacs
for the first time* find the additional download inconvenient.[1]
After that, those who speak up (and some do even without having a bug
to report) say they enjoy the fact that they can update their favorite
packages without reinstalling the core.

In any case, it's easy enough to address conceptually by just
including a reasonably fresh sumo tarball in the core tarball.  It
hasn't been done because beta testers generally don't care (they use
Mercurial, anyway), the stability constraints on 21.4 are severe, and
in any case most distros provide a good installation for those who
just want an editor that works.


Footnotes: 
[1]  That page was also written at a time when we still followed the
old Emacs convention of Lisp under $prefix/lib, while the FLOSS world,
including popular distros, was moving to $prefix/share for FHS
conformance.  This resulted in a fair amount of confusion about where
to find the packages for new users, especially those moving from
distro-provided packages to building from source and SUMO.