Re: Concrete suggestions to improve Org mode third-party integration :: an afterthought following Karl Voit's Orgdown proposal

[Tom Gillespie]

Hi all,
I have a much longer mail in the works, a quick one for now.

I think it is a major strategic mistake to exclude discussions
about interoperability from this list. As Bastien pointed out in
his talk at Emacsconf there is only a single list for both users
and developers. Discussion about interoperability with tools for
working with Org are entirely valid subjects for the user
list. Obviously help and support for other tools is not valid for
the list, but questions about interoperability or incorrectness
of some external tool should always be valid.

We must provide strong technical leadership for all tools that
want to work with Org syntax otherwise we risk it spiraling out
of control. Forcing discussions off list will split the community
and I think the fact that Karl's work made it to this list so
late in the process shows the danger of trying to exclude certain
discussions.

I follow this list, I keep the community up to date with my work,
I have no idea where to look for other Org related dicussions,
nor frankly do I have time to look for them. I suspect I am not
alone in this.

Whether a certain portion of the Org community likes it or not,
there is another portion for whom Org syntax already has a life
beyond Org mode (e.g. academic papers and computation notebook
style workflows). For some workflows documents written in Org
syntax are a primary exchange format and format of record, not
just an internal format from which documents for sharing are
generated. The plain text nature of Org syntax and the freedom
that it enables also means freedom from Emacs. Empowering users
to own and control their own data to use with their own tools is
the whole point. The fact that this means that it works outside
Emacs is a critical feature for many data preservation use cases.

Enough for now. Best!
Tom