Re: Re Org 9.4 is out. Can you help? // breaking apart Org Mode

[Russell Adams]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 09:00:39AM -0400, Nicholas Savage wrote:
> I'm new to the development scene (contributed my first patch to
> Emacs last week or so) and a new developer in general who has been
> looking to get involved. I saw Bastien's post on Hacker News
> yesterday and thought that if Org Mode is looking for contributors
> it would be a good place for me, since I use Org Mode frequently. I
> have a rudimentary understanding of elisp, but I'm looking to
> improve by actually contributing.

Nicholas,

I'm in much the same position. I've offered to help and trying to
participate. My elisp is ok, but I have little practical experience.

>From the code standpoint my concern for several years has been that
Org is so powerful, too powerful, that every edge case asks attention
to be added into core. There are so many things Org has been expanded
to do that were outside of the original scope. That growth can't be
sustained with volunteer time forever.

Rather than a huge refactoring or pushing code back into other Emacs
modes, my thought was that Org should be trimmed into the "core" of
Org functions and that other things should be implemented as modules
available in MELPA outside of the official Org core. That way the
limited maintainer time can be focused on the core of Org and
maintaining strong interfaces for components made and maintained by
others.

I understand that there may be some effort already underway to push
items into external packages.

Perhaps this is a better place to start than a huge refactoring
effort? Also note that I feel like the constant deluge of additions
prohibits refactoring and code improvement in the core. That's my
outside perspective though.


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Russell Adams                            RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.com

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