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Do you think it's maybe time to move Gnus out of the Emacs core distribution and maintain it as a package in ELPA?

It feels wrong to me to be maintaining so much unnecessary code in the core distribution.

Gnus only got moved into Emacs core a couple of years ago. Lars got tired of supporting fourteen different Emacs versions, including XEmacs, and finally just tied it to core. The ELPA package repository is developing the concept of core-but-installable, whereby a package is shipped with core, but a newer version can be installed via ELPA, and that might be a viable path for Gnus.

I don't think the issue was needing Gnus in core, so much as it was avoiding all the multi-version support headache. But one could simply declare that the package is only supported for the two most recent Emacs versions, for instance, and call it good.

No. The core distribution isn't that big, and I like how it contains features that harken back to an earlier era – it acts as a sort of history museum on matters that younger programmers might like to learn about.

It's well over a million lines of elisp, which is not small. But it's certainly not much disk space.

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