ELPA and core services

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John Wiegley writes:

 > Please, please no.  I use lots of Emacsen on lots of machines, and only a few
 > have my configuration copied over.  Please don't turn unconfigured Emacsen
 > into brain-dead zombies of little value.

That won't happen.  XEmacs made the mistake of distributing core
XEmacs without the SUMO package, but Emacs doesn't need to make the
same mistake, and even if it did it would be easy to rectify once you
have a package system.  (It's also not that big a mistake, as the
continued, if attenuated, existence of XEmacs shows.)

 > Now, this I agree with completely.  ELPA overrides is a great idea, and I
 > think it could accelerate development -- as long as inter-package version
 > dependencies are managed.

I doubt it will accelerate development by much.  Managing the real
dependencies between separately maintained code bases (even if they're
in the same tree!) is what slows down development, not distributing
changes.