Re: dictionary.el could be included in main stream Emacs - Re: A proposal for a friendlier Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2020 19:05:23 +0300
> From: Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>
> Cc: juri@linkov.net, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>   alexander.adolf@condition-alpha.com, drew.adams@oracle.com,
>   rms@gnu.org
> 
> Torsten have just agreed to be willing to include the dictionary.el in
> the main stream Emacs.
> 
> Can you help on the process?

Sure.

Thorsten, I see you already have copyright assignment on file for
Emacs, and AFAICT contributions by others are very small and don't
require assignments.  So we are fine from the legal paperwork POV.

The next question would be how would you prefer to go about the
inclusion?  There are several alternatives; the most convenient for us
would be to move the dictionary.el development into the Emacs Git
repository.  Would that be okay with you (we will give you write
access to the Emacs Git in this case, of course)?

If this is not acceptable, we can discuss other options.

Also, I think we will want to make some changes in the package.  One
is to require 'cl-lib', not 'cl' (the latter causes a warning in
recent versions of Emacs).  Another change was discussed here
recently: to add a feature that at first invocation detects whether a
local DICT server is available, and use that, falling back to a remote
server.  This could be triggered by a special value of the
dictionary-server defcustom, for example, in which case we would want
to make that special value the default.

TIA (and thanks for developing this package over the years).