Re: Adding major or popular language modes to Emacs distribution

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> Cc: Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>,  hi@ypei.me,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2021 17:03:10 +0200
> 
> What I was thinking of is that some of prog modes that ship with Emacs are
> frankly not very good compared to external packages, and people are anyway
> downloading something else (for exapel js vs js2 or lisp vs slime/sly). It 
> would
> be nice if everything was in Emacs by default but, maybe it is better to 
> lessen
> the burden on Emacs devs themselves and point users to external package 
> instead.

Lessening the maintenance burden is not the most important goal of
Emacs development; providing users with better support for their
editing jobs is more important.

I don't think anyone will disagree that Emacs should support JS OOTB.

> Now that we have non gnu elpa, and Stefan says it is no problem to ship 
> someone
> elses packages, maybe some good soul could package those into non gnu elpa and
> Emacs could do like some other text editors, simply point users to download
> needed package or download it on demand?
> 
> There was no non gnu elpa before, maybe you could revise the policy in that
> light?

Non-GNU ELPA is not part of the equation, because packages put there
will probably never be able to become part of Emacs.  The issue at
hand here is whether to have packages that support important features
in GNU ELPA or in core.