PSARC/2008/494 GNU emacs

[James Carlson]

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.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
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