package systems: GNU emacs vs Xemacs

Uwe Brauer writes:

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

Patches welcome; shouldn't be hard.

 >     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.

Patches welcome; shouldn't be hard.

 >     7  there is no conflict between the experimental package and the
 >        official one.

Wrong.  You're not *warned* about the conflict.  This is just the
shadowing scenario that you've suffered from several times in the
past.  I suspect that Emacs hasn't run into this yet because the
packages that cause the most problems for XEmacs users are integrated
into core in Emacs anyway, and so get upgraded in step.  (They cause
problems because they're a gnarly knot of interdependencies.)

I don't know, maybe it would be better to expose the user to the risk,
specifically because of the situation where the user wants to install
an upgraded package but doesn't have root.