Re: Re Org 9.4 is out. Can you help? // breaking apart Org Mode

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

>> Rather than a huge refactoring or pushing code back into other Emacs
>> modes, my thought was that Org should be trimmed into the "core" of
>> Org functions and that other things should be implemented as modules
>> available in MELPA outside of the official Org core. That way the
>> limited maintainer time can be focused on the core of Org and
>> maintaining strong interfaces for components made and maintained by
>> others.

> I agree with this goal, as long as Org modules are maintained too.
>
> Picking up the example I gave above in this thread of modularizing
> org-table.el, it will be a good think iff it gets as much attention
> than Org's core itself.

Keep in mind that this will make it much harder to change org-api.

I have some experience with Mecurial extensions, as a maintainer of
those, and basically every extension which is not shipped with Mercurial
(those live in the same source tree) is broken from time to time.

I had to give up one extension and two are currently broken (but not yet
really given up), because I could not keep up with the changes in
Mercurial, simply due to reduced free time.

So while I think that having a stronger separation, I only see a good
case for moving parts out of the org-mode source tree when there is
considerably more activity in those parts than in the core. That can
allow faster release-cycles than org itself, since fewer parts have to
be tested.

Stuff that’s moved out while it does not have its own community is in
danger of becoming dead code that must not be broken, but is much less
convenient to test (and the tests harder to automate) when stuff in org
core changes.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein
ohne es zu merken

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