Re: The MH-E repository

[Jérôme Marant]

Selon Miles Bader <address@hidden>:

> Jérôme Marant <address@hidden> writes:
> > I'll add that trying to integrate more and more lisp modules in Emacs
> > core is bad
>
> mh-e is _already_ part of Emacs, so it seems sort of a moot point.

Since 22.0 only.

> > and even worst since there are so few Emacs releases that people
> > always use more recent versions of modules they grabbed from outside
> > instead of the ones shipped with Emacs (for example: Gnus, speedbar,
> > ...).
>
> The two distribution methods need not conflict (e.g., Gnus seems to work
> fine standalone, despite also being part of the distribution).

I didn't say they are.

> For packages where the user doesn't care so much about being on the
> cutting edge -- and I'd argue this is the most of them -- it's _very_
> convenient to have some version available without having to deal with
> issues related to separate distribution (these are less of a problem if
> you're using a good packaging system with good maintainers, like debian,
> but I think most Emacs users aren't).  This especially true of the small
> packages which seem to be typical for Emacs and elisp.

What about bugs in packages? There are many bugs in 21.4 that have
already been fixed in the CVS trunk but noone cared for providing
bugfix releases in between.
At Debian, we have tons of bugs about Gnus 5.9 (shipped with Emacs)
but we certainly are not going to search for fixes: they have surely
been fixed already and everyone stopped using it in favour of the
external package.

If you are not interested in bugfix releases, a good tradeoff is to
ship them outside and to update them more frequently.

--
Jérôme Marant