Re: Upcoming merge of adaptive-wrap

[Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>]

On 25/01/2024 03:39, Po Lu wrote:
> Several months ago I tried to contact the maintainer of adaptive-wrap
> regarding the inclusion of his package into Emacs proper, who did not
> respond over all the months that have since passed.  (In general I was
> met with stony silence.  It's funny how pandemonium erupts when a minor
> proposal to introduce _new_ code appears, but the same people wash their
> hands of minor chores required for the code to remain useful.

One goes well in hand with the other: more code means more code for 
somebody to maintain.

>)  It's a
> fair bet that the package maintainer is not actively engaged in its
> development anymore, so if I hear no serious objections in the next few
> days I will write the documentation and merge this invaluable feature
> into master.

So... your plan it to merge an unmaintained piece of code into master?

If your intention was to contribute fixes, I think you have commit 
access to the ELPA repository.

> I think placing the package on ELPA was unwise and would not have taken
> place but for our obsession with moving things to ELPA.  Minor features
> will never justify the hassle of browsing through the package list,
> downloading them from the Internet, and updating them with each new
> release of Emacs that obsoletes this or that feature.

There is a particular advantage for optional features being in ELPA: 
people can browse it and search the list of keywords. It serves as a 
tool for discovery for many.

When the package is in the core, it doesn't appear in any of similar 
structured lists, you really have to hunt around for discover those 
features.

> For the future,
> could we please adopt at least the following two criteria for installing
> packages in ELPA rather than Emacs?  They're not very precise but better
> than nothing.
> 
>    - The package is of sufficient size to be worthy of Internet
>      installation, and provides features in demand high enough that users
>      proactively research and install them.
> 
>    - The package maintainer desires that it be distributed over ELPA.
> 
> Even those proprietary text editors developed behind closed doors do not
> relegate useful text editing features to their extension repositories.

That's incorrect.

And we also have the example of the popular open source text editor 
(which is dominating the rating on stackoverflow, etc) which puts a lot 
of language features in the packages' repository.