Re: Sync up the org in emacs master to org maint branch?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> It is a mistake because you are creating more moving targets and bring
> them together very late in the release process. This reduces the amount
> of testing that is done for those packages, so bugs will be noticed
> later and the quality of the relases suffer. It moves even more work
> into the RC-phase, which is already crowded and where people who can fix
> those bugs might not be readily available. It removes those packages
> from Emacs CI, so that breakages due to changes in core are not
> immediately noticed, and often times they have to be fixed not by those
> who created the breakage, but by those who notice them.

Indeed, moving something to elpa.git has benefits but also downsides.

Another downside is that ELPA packages need to be compatible with
various Emacs releases, whereas bundled code can happily ignore those
compatibility issues.  Of course, the reverse is true as well: if
CEDET-core is an ELPA package, then CEDET-client packages don't need to
be compatible with older CEDET-core.

I think the most important issue is to avoid duplicating branches.
Moving (parts of) CEDET to elpa.git is/was mostly motivated by the
desire to avoid the difficulties of sync'ing between the Emacs code and
the upstream code, since the elpa.git branch could hopefully evolve
in-sync with the upstream (or could even *be* the uptream), whereas that
was more difficult for the code in emacs.git.

If the CEDET code in emacs.git becomes "the upstream", then moving it to
elpa.git is much less interesting.


        Stefan