Re: Fwd: sign off on XEmacs 21.5
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
David Kastrup writes:
> missing a lot of functionality. You are probably also aware that
> upstream AUCTeX provides a ready-made working uptodate XEmacs
> package that the XEmacs developers refuse to distribute citing
> "quality control" policies.
Please stop calling it an "XEmacs package"; it's a tarball that has
been crafted to unpack in the same place as an XEmacs package.
And to contain every file and metafile that an XEmacs package contains.
That means that you can use the package management for checking your
version and removing or downgrading the package.
The only technical difference to an XEmacs package is that it is not
distributed as one. The form is identical.
People are more than welcome to use it in that way if they wish, and
it will probably work fine for them. Nevertheless, it is a
third-party tarball, not an XEmacs package, and it is your job, not
ours, to distribute and support it.
That's what we ended up doing, yes. And it is your job, not ours, to
distribute and support the officially blessed XEmacs package. If you
did a better job with that, we would not even have needed to create and
distribute our own sacrilegious tarballs in the first place.
And why are those even two different jobs? Because of XEmacs package
policies.
It is fine if you don't want to open a can of worms, but that does not
mean that one should not bite the bullet and call a spade a spade.
After all, the purpose of a _policy_ is to be useful _overall_. If it
were obviously better _always_, one would not need a policy rather than
the individual decisions it replaces. Putting blinders on and refusing
to notice the downsides means that reevaluation and adjustment becomes
impossible.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
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