Re: "Write a new package" culture instead of patches?

[Matthias Meulien]

Stefan Kangas <address@hidden> writes:

> There's a general problem that when package <foo> lacks small 
> feature <bar>, some users don't see this as a chance to write a 
> patch for <foo>.  Instead, they write a new library <foo>-<bar> 
> to add this feature. 
>
> Sometimes, of course, this is the correct choice.  But I've seen 
> some very small packages just to basically patch this or that 
> annoyance in a package, or in core.  For example: 
>
>     https://github.com/Fuco1/eshell-bookmark/issues/1

Stefan, may be you'll like to have support for bookmark.el in VC 
dir buffers too (see bug #39722)? ;-)

> (FWIW, I think we should have a policy to reject such packages 
> on technical grounds (and ideally MELPA would do the same).) 
>
> Now, this is an extreme example, but many more could be found. 
> Why are the authors of "helpful.el" not helping us mainline some 
> of their great innovation, for example? 
>
> Has anyone else thought about this?  Is it correct to say that 
> such a "package first" culture has developed?  If yes, why has 
> it developed, and is there anything we could do about it?

I guess good reasons to prefer small packages to fix annoyances is 
that: 

1) The delay can be long between a patch is submitted and it is 
  commented or merged (already two months for the mentionned 
  one). OTOH packages are immediatly availables to all your 
  computers

2) It's not clear to me whether trivial patches are welcome or 
not; My 
  feeling is that they're wasting precious time of core Emacs 
  developers
--
Matthias