Re: What is GNU ELPA?

[Stefan Monnier]

> As I understand it, space is the only reason that we don't
> put all those packages in the core.

AFAIK space was definitely not the motivation (GNU ELPA has grown a fair
bit since then, so maybe nowadays we'd think twice before adding those
packages to emacs.git, but it's still not the main motivation, AFAICT).

The reasons were rather to:
- Decouple those packages from Emacs's release cycle.
- Avoid the never ending problems with packages that are in emacs.git
  but whose "upstream" is elsewhere, where the two code bases require
  extra efforts to keep them in sync (enough efforts that sometimes this
  sync is lost, as is the case for CEDET IIRC).
- More generally give more freedom to the authors (many authors are
  *not* interested in having their code in emacs.git because of the
  extra constraints that it implies).

The last two problems *also* affect GNU ELPA, ironically, tho to
a lesser extent.


        Stefan