Grey Matter

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> ~ writes:
>
>  > I simply ran the setup program and did specify that I wanted all
>  > the options.  Funny thing but GNU emacs seems to not have this
>  > problem.
>
> They *can't* have this problem.  GNU Emacs doesn't provide a package
> system; you get absolutely everything they offer, no less, and no
> more.  They've seen the light; the next version of GNU Emacs will
> provide a package system.  My bet is that the one after that will be
> similar to XEmacs's (i.e., most applications will be provided
> separately), as the burden on developers of bootstrapping a whole
> system from scratch has become very large, and will only get larger as
> more packages are added.

That's not my bet.  Emacs is still on its forward path to providing a
consistent IDE and that means advancing forward on several fronts at
once in a more or less interlocked manner.

There is nothing yet in the packager that would sensibly deal with
version dependencies.  I know from AUCTeX that it has been an absolute
pain to provide compatibility with Emacs 20.4(?) APIs because XEmacs has
not bothered keeping up.  Lagging 5 to 10 years behind the core
usability because of packages wanting to apply to more than the latest
version of Emacs is a severe brake.  At the current level of
sophistication, packaging of core parts will just be useful for letting
various parts bitrot at independent speed.

-- 
David Kastrup