Re: ELPA policy

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 11/09/2015 05:42 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > Imagine someone implements an awesome new feature for dired.  Emacs
> > users the world over are amazed by this, and fill their blogs, twitter,
> > etc. with the news.  If dired is an ELPA package, everyone who hears
> > this news can get the new feature in their emacs instantly by upgrading
> > their ELPA packages.  No need to wait N months for a new release of
> > emacs, or compile a non-release version of emacs from git.
>
> How is this different when Dired is in the Emacs repository?  The
> Emacs repository is a public one, so anyone and everyone can get the
> latest version from there and use it, if they want.

a) That's a more involved endeavor than installing a package from ELPA. 
And then you don't get the same conveniences, such as automatic updates.

b) There's a much higher probability that Dired depends on something 
only the current development version of Emacs has. ELPA packages declare 
their version requirements explicitly, and try not to break 
compatibility with earlier versions without sufficient reasons.

> The suggestion was to move _all_ of them, except the few that are
> needed for bootstrap, out of the Emacs repository.  Most of the
> packages in that category are neither like Org nor like kermit.  They
> are relatively small, but get quite a significant number of changes.

There were different suggestions, with different degrees between "let's 
move Org and Gnus out" and "let's move everything out".