package systems: GNU emacs vs Xemacs

Hello

Since GNU emacs has now Bidi support I am starting to use it more
often, so naturally I came across their package system. 

Here are a couple of comments and some suggestions.

    1  I cannot judge how difficult it is to maintain a GNU emacs
       package (and to generate one).

    2  I tested in only on Linux Kubuntu, so I don't know who it works
       on other platforms, but I would guess that there is not much of a
       difference.

    3  from a user point of view GNU emacs pkg system seems easier to
       use, because:

    4  you just have to type: package-list-packages, no need to set up a
       server, no need to download a database.

    5  once you fire up that command a list of available packages is
       presented and it is described which pkg is official and which is
       beta. That is more comfortable than the Xemacs approach where you
       have to download two different database files.

    6  if you as user want to install a beta package, it will be
       installed in your local home directory ~/.emacs.d which is the
       equivalent of ~/.xemacs/xemacs-package. So it is not necessary to
       run GNU emacs as root.

    7  there is no conflict between the experimental package and the
       official one. As I understand if GNU emacs finds two packages, it
       chooses the one which is installed in the user home directory. I
       tried that out, installing an experimental pkg for GNU emacs 25
       and then calling GNU emacs 24 and it complained. GNU emacs 24
       could be only run when this packages was uninstalled.

As I wrote in my recent bug report, we have already feature 6, but it
seems that feature 7 is not implemented. So I suggest to give that
feature a try.

Uwe Brauer