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

[Arthur Miller]

Yuan Fu <address@hidden> writes:

>> On May 17, 2020, at 3:42 PM, Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>> On 17.05.2020 21:52, Stefan Kangas wrote:
>>> Why are
>>> the authors of "helpful.el" not helping us mainline some of their great
>>> innovation, for example?
>> 
>> I think Wilfred worked on some patch or other, to upstream some of the 
>> improvements. But not the whole of it.
>> 
>> Maybe because it's a much bigger job: to port the code, to satisfy all the
>> historically accumulated edge cases, and to spend a few weeks arguing with
>> whoever thinks the previous behavior was better at least in some respect.
>> 
>> We don't really have a conceptual framework for assessing big breaking 
>> changes.
>> 
>
> I think it’s just much easier to write helpful.el from scratch than read all 
> the
> old code and understand it and try to patch it. I could have patched 
> package.el
> to make it fetch from github repos, but instead I just wrote a quick small
> package to do that and moved on, which is much easier than reading and
> understanding package.el and convince people that such change is necessary.
>
> Yuan
This "convincing people that such change is necessary" seems to be
actually an important reason :-).