Re: Introducing emacs-webkit and more thoughts on Emacs rendering (was Rethinking the design of xwidgets)

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

We should not link another library into Emacs unless there is a
particular reason why that library is important.

So far, we have linked in libraries for displaying images which are
part of documents, and we have linked in some libraries for network
protocols that are useful for a variety of purposes.  In these cases
there is an important reason.  Doing these jobs in some other way
would have big disadvantages.

For this job, the disadvantages of the library would impact security
(that library is big), and future maintenance, as well as installation
complexity.  And there is no big disadvantage to forking VLC, or
mplayer2, or whichever player the user prefers.  That is the way we
should do it,

The argument that "We have linked with so many external libraries that
we should not hesitate to add one more" is fundamentally misguided.
Some things are worth paying a price for.  Having bought a few of
them, which msy have been good purchases, it does not follow that we
should rush to buy the whole store.  The price of these purchases is
substantial and we should pay it only when really important.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)