James Carlson wrote: > Ali Bahrami writes: >> Emacs is a pretty mature package (well over 20 years old), and is >> not evolving so fast that old copies are worthless. The value of > > That's not what I was questioning. The part that I was questioning > was whether it was a good thing to be delivering things that we know > we can't update -- particularly when the whole point of the current > "deliver everything" project is (as far as I understand) that the > delivering party is on the hook to do updates. > > You're quite right that older versions of GNU emacs will work fine -- > just look at my email headers. Users can easily get them (and likely > without annoying and extraneous license issues) from other sources. > >> Finally, as more and more software becomes GPLv3, we are going to >> face this issue on multiple fronts, and some answer will have to >> be found. Whatever that answer is, our emacs packages can adapt to >> it. In the interim, there are worse things than having some version >> available. > > We're setting ourselves up for yet more reasons (besides the usual > "resources" one) to deliver stale software if that issue and related > legal problems aren't solved. >
You'll get no argument from me on your larger points. Emacs is far from unique in that regard, and our future probably depends on solving that issue. In the worst case, someone outside of Sun will be driven to deliver a more modern version, maybe using the packaging work I've done as a starting point. - Ali
