Re: ELPA submission: mathjax.el

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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We seem to be talking abopt lots of potential dependencies.  And they
are not limited to C programs and Lisp programs such as Emacs already
includes.  Some of them mey involve practices that raise moral issues.
Or maybe not -- but we don't have enough information here to see
what issues are they might be.

So we must not think of this as a technical problem.  We need a
solution that (1) works _well enough_ and (2) clearly upholds software
freedom.  The solution that is most convenient may or may not be best.

That includes issues raised by ppossible dependencies of dependencies.

then we can study the issues and verify that they don't raise any
moral issues, or find solutions for those.

When we choose a solution, we will need to verify that all the
components are free software.  The way to do that is by testing the
build procedure in an environment where we _know_ we do not have
anything nonfree installed.  If it works there, we can consider
the job done unless/until somsone reports a problem.

In principle, let's consider the idea of treating the mathjax binary
the same way we treat other compiled prackages.  Is that possible?
What would we need to include in the Emacs sources?

The mathjax Javascript program can be packaged separately from Emacs.
We have an Emacs package for using TeX but we don't include TeX in any
Emacs package -- users install that separately.  Is there a reason not to
treat mathjax the same way?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)