Re: Gnus integration (was: MH-E 7.4.4 checked in)

[Luc Teirlinck]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

   I think the problem is that upstream fell out of sync.
   We should really try to avoid any local change that the upstream
   maintainer rejects, otherwise it becomes unmaintainable (I've seen it in
   miniature with cperl-mode.el, and I'd rather not think about what it can
   turn into with something like Gnus).

I indeed believe that no changes (in Emacs CVS) to packages
distributed with Emacs should be made without discussing them with the
maintainers of those packages.  People making changes to Emacs CVS
usually do not worry about all the compatibility issues that the
maintainers of those packages do worry about a lot, so merging changes
may indeed become very non-trivial.  For instance, my original
proposed patch to tramp.el did not take compatibility issues into
account, but, after discussing this with Kai, the patch I actually
committed does, so that there should be no merging difficulties.  If
the maintainers of the package know of, and approve of, the change in
its exact form, why should they _not_ include it in their own CVS
version?  In some cases, there might actually be some reasons, like
philosophical differences, say about run-time loading of cl in the
case of cc-mode, but even in those cases, I believe maintainers should
be aware of the changes made to Emacs CVS.

Sincerely,

Luc.