bug#511: package for potential inclusion in emacs

[Chong Yidong]

John Heidemann <johnh@isi.edu> writes:

> I have done a copyright assignment before, although I don't remember
> if it was general or for a specific thing (you might search for
> mouse-extras.el) or mouse-drag.el.  If you're concerned, I should
> probably re-do one for the notes-mode package.
>
> All external contributions were of the one-line, no-copyright-needed
> variety.

I just checked: your assignment is for general contributions to Emacs.
So that's fine.

However, there are a couple of doubts that make me hesitant to include
notes-mode in the main Emacs distribution.  Firstly, it's a moderately
sized package with multiple source files, including perl scripts; for
reasons of convenience and cleanliness, packages of a similar nature
tend to be distributed seperately from Emacs and not bundled with it
(e.g., AucTeX and preview-latex).  Secondly, there are a couple of
packages around that do a similar thing, such as John Wiegley's planner
mode.

Neither of these means that we can't ultimately include notes-mode, but
I'd prefer to take some time evaluating it and discussing it on
emacs-devel first.  I'm really sorry you've been waiting since 2006 (!),
but it may be better to schedule this for inclusion into Emacs 23.2 at
the earliest, instead of Emacs 23.1 (which may be six to nine months
from now, though it's not certain).

In the meantime, however, we should add notes-mode to etc/MORE.STUFF.
Could you send an entry for MORE.STUFF, similar to the other entries in
that file?

Again, I'm sorry this dropped off the radar screen after your initial
message to us in 2006.