On Saturday, January 25, 2020, Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net> wrote:

> I care about stability, not MELPA Stable.  It's your choice to use MELPA
> Stable, and you're free to upgrade or downgrade individual packages to
> work around such occasional, temporary breakage caused by it--the pieces
> are yours to keep.  I'm sorry for any inconvenience, but your config is
> up to you.


I'm making an extremely late reply, sorry.

It seems to me that this last statement ("Your config is up to you"), or perhaps the point of view that produces it, is not self-evident when applied to package versions. I think that in some way it's near the heart of the controversy.

Maybe for me personally, my config being up to me (regarding package versions) is a disadvantage. I gratefully make use of a number of packages that I don't fully understand, and if I was required to study all of them until I was confident that I *did* fully understand them before installing, I'd just give up using Emacs at all.

I don't think there's likely to be any person who uses all of the packages offered in the list. It appears to me that there are sort of "interest groups" of Emacs users, where members of each group tend to all install, use, and collectively debug a similar subset of what's available. I've discovered that if I install the packages that are most popular among the org-mode group, Emacs does what I want and everything seems to work. A sort of de facto "group curation system", that has created a sort of unofficial ad-hoc "org-mode group consensus distro of Emacs".

--
David

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David Rogers