Subject: Re: package for potential inclusion in emacs

From: John Heidemann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:15:25 -0700

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:40:36 EDT, Chong Yidong wrote: 
>John Heidemann <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> I have done a copyright assignment before, although I don't remember
>> if it was general or for a specific thing (you might search for
>> mouse-extras.el) or mouse-drag.el.  If you're concerned, I should
>> probably re-do one for the notes-mode package.
>>
>> All external contributions were of the one-line, no-copyright-needed
>> variety.
>
>I just checked: your assignment is for general contributions to Emacs.
>So that's fine.
>
>However, there are a couple of doubts that make me hesitant to include
>notes-mode in the main Emacs distribution.  Firstly, it's a moderately
>sized package with multiple source files, including perl scripts; for
>reasons of convenience and cleanliness, packages of a similar nature
>tend to be distributed seperately from Emacs and not bundled with it
>(e.g., AucTeX and preview-latex).  Secondly, there are a couple of
>packages around that do a similar thing, such as John Wiegley's planner
>mode.

I certainly understand waintence concerns about dropping perl in to the
emacs tree.  It was OK with rms when we talked about it around 2000
(provided I make startup changes that were done in 2006), but things may
have changed.

About planner mode, I wasn't aware of it.  My guess is it post-dates
notes-mode, not that that matters.

My quick look at it (web pages only) is that it appears to have better
support for planning things (keeping lists of tasks, schedules, etc.).
Its journaling functions are project based (file-per-project), with
dates as subheads in each file, while notes-modes are date-based
(file-per-day) with projects as subheads.

The core part of notes-mode is that it auto-generates links that fit a
certain style of working, with file-per-day and subheads per task.  It's
not clear to me to what extent planner-mode autogenerates links.

>Neither of these means that we can't ultimately include notes-mode, but
>I'd prefer to take some time evaluating it and discussing it on
>emacs-devel first.  I'm really sorry you've been waiting since 2006 (!),
>but it may be better to schedule this for inclusion into Emacs 23.2 at
>the earliest, instead of Emacs 23.1 (which may be six to nine months
>from now, though it's not certain).
>
>In the meantime, however, we should add notes-mode to etc/MORE.STUFF.
>Could you send an entry for MORE.STUFF, similar to the other entries in
>that file?

Does this work?

* Notes-mode: <URL:http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/NOTES_MODE/index.html>

>
>Again, I'm sorry this dropped off the radar screen after your initial
>message to us in 2006.

No problem.  Part of the delay was on my end.

   -John