Re: Tree-sitter introduction documentation

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2023 23:06:13 -0500
> 
>   > There's a command to download and install a grammar library, but it
>   > leaves it to the user to specify from where to download the library
>   > the user wants.
> 
> Could you please tell me more?  Or tell me how to find that source code?

If you mean the source code of the Emacs command I mentioned above,
then its name is treesit-install-language-grammar, and it was added to
lisp/treesit.el a few days ago.

> I think there is a significant difference between referring users to a
> released tarball of some free program, and referring users to a
> development repo of that same program.
> 
> In a purely technical sense, any bad thing that is possible with a
> repo is possible with a release tarball.  However, if we consider the
> social practices of using the two, I think referring users to the repo
> lacks proper caution -- we shouldn't recommend it to users in general.

Unfortunately, it looks like the developers of the grammar libraries
make only infrequent releases, and some don't make any releases.  Just
as one example, Alan Mackenzie recently reported a bug in the
c++-ts-mode which was apparently caused by using the last released
version of the C++ grammar, from Oct 2021, which is already fixed in
their Git repository.  So the ability to download and install the
latest development version seems to be important in this case, at
least when it is known that the last released version has a bug.