Re: [O] org mode moves to GNU emacs core

[Phillip Lord]

Tim Cross <address@hidden> writes:

> Just to throw my 2 cents in.
>
> While I can understand the benefits of being able to easily install the
> latest org package via elpa, I think there are some significant benefits
> to org being a part of core Emacs.
>
> I currently find three issues with the current situation which may be
> somewhat resolved if org was part of core emacs.
>
> 1. Problems with mixed versions. Currently, Emacs has org 8.x included
> in the distribution. This is despite 9.x being out before the release of
> 25.2. Something needs to be done to improve coordination and perhaps if
> it was part of the core, this would be more likely. At any rate, the
> current situation means you need to be very careful to ensure no org
> feature is loaded before the ELPA package is loaded or you will get odd
> behaviour and the symbol's value is void errors. 


I've argued on emacs-devel about this. The problem here is that the
distributed org-mode remains in the load path, so you are totally
dependent on load path shadowing to ensure the right package gets
loaded. This doesn't happen with ELPA packages since only the latest
gets added to the load path.

My solution to this would be to have Emacs use package.el to load
files in core as well as elsewhere. Then, when you installed org from
ELPA, package.el would remove the core installed files from the
load-path (or rather never add them). You'd need to restart Emacs after
installation, but otherwise the problem goes away.

Everybody else thought this was a bad idea!

Phil