Re: [O] Remove Org from Emacs repository?

[Phillip Lord]

Reuben Thomas <address@hidden> writes:

> On 18 December 2016 at 13:20, Carsten Dominik <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I'd hate to see Org removed from Emacs.  It took a lot of work to get it
>> in, and I believe that the vast majority of Emacs users does not install
>> packages.  For a newbie to get to Emacs and to be able to open a .org file
>> is a big plus.  So my vote goes toward keeping it in.
>>
>
> ​Since you're responsible for org-mode, and I guess you're happy with the
> coordination between (your) upstream and Emacs, then ​I agree it should
> continue to be distributed out of the box.
>
> However, your comments raise a couple of thoughts:
>
> 1. Is there something hard about packages that could be made easier? For
> example, Atom seems to get along fine without many built-in packages, so
> that most users expect to install some.
>
> 2. Is there any possibility to make org-mode a build-time dependency of
> Emacs, like the C libraries that it requires, or is that a silly idea? That
> could permit it to be shipped as built-in, without having its source
> duplicated in Emacs's repository.

This kind of idea is, indeed, being actively considered on
emacs-devel. In fact, I managed to get a simple version of this working
using package.el during the build process. The idea would be that
packages in ELPA format could be made available to Emacs during the
build and then be packaged with the tarball as now.

The general feedback on my implementation was negative, but the general
principle is something that people are keen to pursue, hopefully for
Emacs-26. Org-mode would make a good test case for this.

Another possibility would be to extend the current "autoload"
functionality, so that it can install via package.el before
autoloading. Might work, but not tried that yet.


Phil