On 18 December 2016 at 13:20, Carsten Dominik <dominik@uva.nl> wrote:

Dear all,

I'd hate to see Org removed from Emacs. It took a lot of work to get it in, and I believe that the vast majority of Emacs users does not install packages. For a newbie to get to Emacs and to be able to open a .org file is a big plus. So my vote goes toward keeping it in.

Since you're responsible for org-mode, and I guess you're happy with the coordination between (your) upstream and Emacs, then I agree it should continue to be distributed out of the box.

However, your comments raise a couple of thoughts:

1. Is there something hard about packages that could be made easier? For example, Atom seems to get along fine without many built-in packages, so that most users expect to install some.

2. Is there any possibility to make org-mode a build-time dependency of Emacs, like the C libraries that it requires, or is that a silly idea? That could permit it to be shipped as built-in, without having its source duplicated in Emacs's repository.