Re: New Package for NonGNU-ELPA: clojure-ts-mode

[Philip Kaludercic]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2023 21:52:31 +0300
>> Cc: stefankangas@gmail.com, philipk@posteo.net, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>>  manuel.uberti@inventati.org
>> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
>> 
>> On 25/08/2023 08:42, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> > IME, the development model of Emacs is an important reason why Emacs
>> > is still alive and kicking almost 40 years since it was first
>> > developed.  And important major modes in Emacs are alive and kicking
>> > with it.  So inclusion in Emacs and the pains of adjusting to a
>> > different development model are justified if one wants the major mode
>> > to remain alive for many years to come.  Something to think about, I
>> > guess.
>> 
>> Or the longevity stems from other reasons (e.g. good fundamental ideas, 
>> unique proposition, being part of the original GNU system, ...), and the 
>> development process is the reason the current user base is a fraction of 
>> even Vim's (not to mention popular commercial offerings).
>> 
>> Just an alternative POV to consider. In truth, could be a little of both.
>
> Mine wasn't a POV, it was an observation based on many years of
> watching the development and being part of it.

Correct me if I am wrong: This seems to be related to the fact that the
GitHub-model (thought it probably precedes it) of development has
motivated more and more individuals to maintain packages, instead of
organisations like GNU, Apache, etc.  Or at least I understand that if
there is a collective effort behind maintaining the components of a
system, contributors can come and go without a package being abandoned
-- this is especially true for Emacs due to the extensive
introspectability.  But it appears this reaches a limit, if a component
is too complex (CEDET was mentioned as one example, and if João were to
suddenly loose interest in contributing to Emacs, something similar
might happen to Eglot as well).

I only mention this, because I don't agree with the premise that this
boils down to "mailing-list" or "web-interface".  While it is true that
a lot of people are uncertain and afraid of sending a message to a
mailing list, this fear is unreasonable and worth dispelling.

I think there is a reasonable point to be made that the CA prevents
certain valuable contributions from entering Emacs/GNU ELPA.  IANAL, so
I don't know if a sign-off procedure would be a sufficient alternative?
But if I am a bit cynical, I cannot deny that having a CA-system can
also help filtering out a lot of noise and low-quality code (I'd claim
that the average quality of a ELPA package is higher than that of
packages on MELPA...).