Re: "Write a new package" culture instead of patches?

[Yuan Fu]

> On May 17, 2020, at 3:42 PM, Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 17.05.2020 21:52, Stefan Kangas wrote:
>> Why are
>> the authors of "helpful.el" not helping us mainline some of their great
>> innovation, for example?
> 
> I think Wilfred worked on some patch or other, to upstream some of the 
> improvements. But not the whole of it.
> 
> Maybe because it's a much bigger job: to port the code, to satisfy all the 
> historically accumulated edge cases, and to spend a few weeks arguing with 
> whoever thinks the previous behavior was better at least in some respect.
> 
> We don't really have a conceptual framework for assessing big breaking 
> changes.
> 

I think it’s just much easier to write helpful.el from scratch than read all 
the old code and understand it and try to patch it. I could have patched 
package.el to make it fetch from github repos, but instead I just wrote a quick 
small package to do that and moved on, which is much easier than reading and 
understanding package.el and convince people that such change is necessary.

Yuan