So? He's not the maintainer of the project. Anyway, that's clearly a non-scaleable solution. No software engineer would be attracted to this design, only someone with a fanatical obsession with GPL which blinds him to engineering considerations. The emacs core developers can't take on the burden of maintaining every bit of add-on functionality that is written throughout human history and seems useful enough to want to include in emacs. These things should have test suites; maintaining a discrete project like magit or org-mode is the job of the magit/org-mode developers, and should be isolated from the core Emacs code base, interacting via the API provided by Emacs core. One job of the core developers is to design and maintain that API.
I think you misunderstand the issue. The Emacs maintainers would not have to maintain Magit, and that's not what this is about. This is about distribution.
Note that the GNU ELPA is considered to be part of Emacs, whereas MELPA is not. MELPA may also contain unlicensed software or otherwise non-free software.
> The Emacs maintainers would not have to maintain Magit
That's not true. They would have to maintain it: deal with bug reports, deal with breakage due to upstream API changes in Emacs core. They wouldn't do feature development.
I used to contribute code to org-mode, so I know how this works. The magit team will make periodic releases, at which point the magit code will be copied over into the emacs code base. From that point on, the emacs maintainers are on the hook for any bugs or other problems occurring with the version of magit that they have included into Emacs. They'll have to deal with/triage magit bug reports received via the Emacs bug tracker.
Honest question, because from the outside he seems like an absolute grognard whose computing habits are so far removed from those of everyone else that he is incapable of relating to how the modern world does its computing.
Perhaps if he wants a good git interface in emacs, RMS should sling some code instead of giving the same entry-level ethics talk ad nauseam.
Why would that even matter? I find this attitude very puzzling and extremely worrying.
Of all the arbitrary metrics to decide whether to listen to and consider somebody's position "lines of code written" seems like an exceptionally poor choice.
I find your comment to be a good example of what is wrong in circles that like to consider themselves part of hacker culture.
It's not even a GPL/non-GPL issue. Magit is licensed under the GPLv3.
It's because the FSF doesn't have assignment of the copyright to the code and there's no signed contributor agreements. The insane part of this isn't wanting it to be FOSS (it is!!), it's insisting it to be a part of the core project.
