Re: PL support

[Daniel Colascione]

On 5/10/20 7:35 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ 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. ]]]
>
> Some contributors are eagerly planning a sort of automatic facility to
> "install external tools."  I'm disappointed to have to say that this
> raises problems at various levels.  I doubt there is an acceptable way
> to do it.

And more and more, a modern editing experience requires working with 
shared infrastructure like LSP servers. If someone downloads Emacs and 
it doesn't even approximate a modern editing experience out-of-the-box, 
people are going to use other, less-free or non-free tools. The moral 
purity of a program doesn't matter if it has no impact, and a program 
with no users has no impact.

You seem to be imagining a world in which Emacs installing external 
software means that it runs distribution package manager tools or plops 
binaries in /usr/bin. You can instead bundle known-good versions of 
external tools with Emacs and run them in a controlled way from 
filesystem locations that Emacs controls. Downloading revisions of these 
tools that hash to entries on an Emacs whitelist is equivalent.