RE: Guile in Emacs

[Drew Adams]

> It is not okay for critical documentation to be hosted
> anywhere but a user's hard drive,

1. Not every bit of description of every single Common-Lisp construct is
"critical" documentation. Far from it.

You've added "critical" now, but your previous argument was against all, not
just "critical", non-local reference.


2. Depending on what is meant by such a watered-down meaning of "critical", it
would be absurd in 2010 and beyond to limit, by design, the doc set to what is
or can be hosted on a user's hard drive.

Which user? What size hard drive? Will you tailor the available doc set by
design to Emacs running on a 1 gig flash drive or other lowest common
denominator?

Nowadays, the number of people who actually download PDF docs for a large
software product, in order to have them locally, is miniscule, compared to the
number who consult the same doc set on demand, on line (Web) as HTML.

It is good for users to be _able_ to have a certain number of core docs locally.
And they should be able to control just how much they want to keep locally and
how much they are willing to access remotely.

But that doesn't mean that the entire doc set for Emacs (or anything else) needs
to be or should be kept to a minimal size that every user could store on a
typical hard disk.


Yes, there are good reasons to avoid documentation bloat - always. Just as there
are good reasons to avoid software bloat (a more important argument concerning
CL, perhaps). The question in both cases is whether users _need_ all that doc or
all that software. _If_ we decide the answer is yes, then, well, it's needed,
regardless of how big typical hard disks might be this year.

A hard-and-simple hard-disk criterion such as you express is not appropriate.
Doc that is not needed by users is wasted and should be pruned. But if some
particular doc is needed to explain something, then it's needed, period.