Re: XEmacs feature missing in GNU Emacs?

[Christopher Schmidt]

Steven Degutis <sbdegutis@gmail.com> writes:

> Advantages such as...?

To me, being an ordinary Emacs user, the most striking advantage is the
separation of release cycles.

GNU Emacs is a vivid ecosystem of different packages.  The release
distribution is a static snapshot.

This is not exactly problematic to all these lisp packages which are
mature and do not change much any more.  It is problematic to those
packages which still undergo development.  Consider Org-Mode, for
example.  One is pretty much on its own in terms of community support
and specific bug fixes if one uses the distribution bundled with GNU
Emacs.

Separate release cycles of core and packages and release new versions of
packages when they are considered mature and stable - not when another
core release of Emacs accidentally happens.

This does not necessarily imply any user visible changes or massive
changes to the development infrastructure.  For starters, use the
package.el magic to generate packages from the lisp/-tree at build-time.
Create an ELPA branch which distributes emergency bug/security fixes and
major releases of packages such as Gnus, Org-Mode or CEDET on top (!) of
the regular distribution in the release tarball.

Stephen wrote a retrospective assessment of XEmacs modularization here:

    http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/151146


I have been thinking about this idea for some time now.  I really like
it.  I am convinced that this is a win for both users and developers.
Are there any notable disadvantages?

        Christopher