[[!meta title="Don't write that package! or: How I learned to stop worrying and love emacs-devel"]] [[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2021 Stefan Kangas"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2021/info/devel-nav)" raw="yes"]] # Don't write that package! or: How I learned to stop worrying and love emacs-devel Stefan Kangas We need a successful Emacs on this planet. This means that we need an excellent out-of-the-box experience -- one that just works, but that you can still hack and customize. There is so much great experimentation and work going on out there in the wider Emacs community, but we would be even better off if more of that could go into Emacs itself. Emacs' greatest strength is unfortunately sometimes also its greatest weakness: it is *too* hackable. On occasion, people out there add stuff to their Init file to fix this or that annoyance, or even bug. The more ambitious might go on to package up such fixes: "Hey, 'foo-mode' doesn't have support for 'bookmark-set', let's write a package!" I am here to suggest that you should not do that. You should submit a patch to Emacs! Maybe more people have that same problem or annoyance, and would benefit from your solution? It is sometimes perceived as hard to contribute to Emacs core. I want to encourage more people to get involved, and show that the barrier to entry is really not that high. If I can do it, you can do it too! So should you really write that package, or should you stop worrying and learn to love emacs-devel? Listen to my talk to find out more! [[!inline pages="internal(2021/info/devel-schedule)" raw="yes"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2021/info/devel-nav)" raw="yes"]]