Re: Introducing emacs-webkit and more thoughts on Emacs rendering (was Rethinking the design of xwidgets)

[Arthur Miller]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

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>
> We should not link another library into Emacs unless there is a
> particular reason why that library is important.
>
> So far, we have linked in libraries for displaying images which are
> part of documents, and we have linked in some libraries for network
> protocols that are useful for a variety of purposes.  In these cases
> there is an important reason.  Doing these jobs in some other way
> would have big disadvantages.
>
> For this job, the disadvantages of the library would impact security
> (that library is big), and future maintenance, as well as installation
> complexity.  And there is no big disadvantage to forking VLC, or
> mplayer2, or whichever player the user prefers.  That is the way we
> should do it,

> The argument that "We have linked with so many external libraries that
> we should not hesitate to add one more" is fundamentally misguided.
It depends on how you read it. If you read it as a solo argument,
a sole purpose of "we have lib A let's have lib B just for purpose of
having it" then I agree with you. But what I ment is saying that
including a library is a security risk and arguing just because of
adding it, is not very much of argument, because we would not have any
external library in Emacs. I don't argue for that one particular just
because we already have so many others. That connects to the next:

> Some things are worth paying a price for.  Having bought a few of
> them, which msy have been good purchases, it does not follow that we
> should rush to buy the whole store.  The price of these purchases is
> substantial and we should pay it only when really important.
Sure of course, not every library under the Sun should be embedded. I am
aware of price/vs cost.

To my knowledge, mpv is probably the neetiest one to bring in media
playing capabilities; it has lots of codecs, is written to be embedded,
is free and would make Emacs be able to play music and video files
without external players. Adding multimedia capabilities opens up for
lots of flexibility and creativity; people can maybe do interesting
stuff with it. I would certainly like Emacs to become a multimedia
player, I play my music with Emacs already :-).

If other people think it is too expensive in terms of implementation
cost and what it offers, and if multimedia is not desirable in Emacs, I
can have understanding with that. I might not agree, but my opinion is
just one persons opinion, and I am not even an Emacs developer, so of
course, you who make Emacs work probably know better and have precedence
in what Emacs should do/have or not. It would be wrong to claim anything
else :).