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From: | Daniel Colascione |
Subject: | Re: PL support |
Date: | Sun, 10 May 2020 20:07:27 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.7.0 |
On 5/10/20 7:35 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] Some contributors are eagerly planning a sort of automatic facility to "install external tools." I'm disappointed to have to say that this raises problems at various levels. I doubt there is an acceptable way to do it.
And more and more, a modern editing experience requires working with shared infrastructure like LSP servers. If someone downloads Emacs and it doesn't even approximate a modern editing experience out-of-the-box, people are going to use other, less-free or non-free tools. The moral purity of a program doesn't matter if it has no impact, and a program with no users has no impact.
You seem to be imagining a world in which Emacs installing external software means that it runs distribution package manager tools or plops binaries in /usr/bin. You can instead bundle known-good versions of external tools with Emacs and run them in a controlled way from filesystem locations that Emacs controls. Downloading revisions of these tools that hash to entries on an Emacs whitelist is equivalent.
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