Re: Ada-mode to be abandoned?

[Daniel Mendler]

Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:

> On 07/01/2024 18:26, Philip Kaludercic wrote:
>> Dmitry <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:
>> 
>>> On Sun, Jan 7, 2024, at 2:34 PM, Philip Kaludercic wrote:
>>>> What I am wondering, is if this simplification were to take place, if it
>>>> would be possible to add ada-mode (or ada-ts-mode in that case) back to
>>>> the core?
>>> What is this fetish of adding everything to the core?
>> For me it is usually just that it is easier for a newcomer to get stuff
>> working, without having to deal with package management, which can be a
>> bother when working offline or in isolated environments.
>
> This can be argued for just about any bit of Elisp code, but we don't want all
> the universe inside the Emacs repo, do we?

While package management may be easier, there is also a discoverability
aspect. Every added package and mode makes it a little bit more
difficult for newcomers to figure out what they want to use. Which mail
client is it going to be, which IRC client, ...? For programming
language modes the problem may not be that significant, since the modes
usually activate themselves. However the documentation still gets
inflated and one may get lost in the sea of information.

In the case of Heex I see this package header:

;;; heex-ts-mode.el --- Major mode for Heex with tree-sitter support -*- 
lexical-binding: t; -*-
;; ...
;; This package provides `heex-ts-mode' which is a major mode for editing
;; HEEx files that uses Tree Sitter to parse the language.

Then there is this NEWS entry:

*** New major mode 'heex-ts-mode'.
A major mode based on the tree-sitter library for editing HEEx files.

This information is not helpful for a newcomer. On the other hand if you
are already an Elixir/Heex user, it should not pose a difficulty for you
to find the appropriate packages on GNU ELPA.

Daniel