value of maintaining emacs-mode packages in ports

[Lowell Gilbert]

[trimmed to a single mailing list]

"Christopher J. Ruwe" <cjr at cruwe.de> writes:

> Since version 24, Emacs, the very good operating system missing only a
> decent editor, has developed a package manager for Emacs
> extensions. Some good repos exist, packages are usually installed to
> ~/.emacs.d and I have come to really enjoy that way of installing
> packages.

The two methods are equivalent on a single-user machine. If we had a
canned method to install Emacs packages to the site-local lisp
directories without using the ports system, that would make the ports
less relevant on multi-user systems as well.

There are also differences in convenience based on which repositories
provide which packages. My first reaction is that removing the ports
would only be advisable for packages available from the official Gnu
repository (elpa.gnu.org), and not for others.

So: I don't think the ports are without value, but we could move that
way for many of them if we wanted. Once the number of users of earlier
versions of emacs is sufficiently small, that is.