Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Rasmus]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> For popular packages to be distributed outside of Emacs and ELPA
> has some bad consequences:
>
> * We can't change them when we change some part of Emacs that they use.
> That makes it hard for us to change interfaces.
>
> * We don't have copyright assignments in them, so we can't move the code
> into Emacs.
>
> * They may say things that work against the GNU Project in other ways,
> such as by recommending nonfree programs, or by recommending rivals of
> GNU packages.
>
> I think therefore that we do more to move the popular packages into
> ELPA or Emacs.

Great!

But this may be easier said than done.

* Take Magit.  According to github it has 124 contributors.  Even if the
  main contributors would agree to move it to ELPA, it may not be easy
  to establish contact to everyone.  Cider has 82, projectile 79 etc.
  The real number of assignments is probably less than the sum, though.

* For auto-complete there's already Company in ELPA (of course there can
  be two packages doing the same thing).

* ESS is already tied to the R project.

Something like integrating the two big ido modes (smex and
ido-ubiquitous) into ido and integrating desired functions from dash
and s may be nice short-run targets (but people with more intimidate
knowledge of Emacs core programming will no doubt have greater
insights on this).

–Rasmus

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