Re: [PATCH] support a few of the new features of C++11 in syntax highlighting

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 17 May 2014 15:27:19 +0200
> 
> from the point of view of those of us that always work with the
> cc-mode integrated on the latest Emacs, it would be the obvious
> workflow. But for those users and contributors with older Emacs
> versions, working with/on the latest cc-mode version would be more
> inconvenient. Alan would be inconvenienced too as he has to
> develop/test cc-mode against multiple Emacs versions.
> 
> So I guess that merging cc-mode into Emacs (a specific branch of Emacs,
> to be precise) would become very easy, but all the rest would be more
> inconvenient, as long as the cc-mode development cares about past Emacs
> versions.

I obviously won't pursue this any longer, as Alan sounds very much set
on his current arrangements.  But I cannot help wondering how real are
all those considerations you mentioned, given that major CC Mode
releases are relatively infrequent, on par with those of Emacs.  IMO,
both separate unsynchronized development and trying to cater to older
Emacs versions only make sense if a package is being released much
more frequently than the Emacs core.  Otherwise, it's pure overhead
and waste of valuable resources, since in practice no one has any good
reasons to use a newer CC Mode with an old Emacs.

The same goes for Gnus, FWIW (which AFAICS no longer provides its own
stable releases anyway), which Alan mentioned as another package with
similar mode of development.

Now, I'm sure a plethora of arguments will follow that would "explain"
why bringing all development to a single repo is not TRT, from the POV
of the developers of the corresponding packages.  But I'm also quite
sure all these arguments are not serious enough to justify the
terrible waste of time and energy we as a community suffer as the
result of these schisms.