James Dyer is continuing his quest to remove as many third party packages as possible from his configuration. This time he’s replacing Magit with vc-mode.
As I’ve said before, I don’t understand this urge to replace more or less proven and debugged code with a homegrown version. Sure, you understand exactly what’s going on and you can make it do precisely what you want but you’re undoubtedly going to introduce bugs that the package has probably already resolved. It’s not as if you’re reducing the Emacs footprint by any significant amount so why bother?
In this case, though, Dyer has a point. Dyer uses Git at home but Subversion at work. Magit, of course, is for Git so rather than negotiate two different interfaces, he’s settled on one. That makes perfect sense to me. Emacs is, after all, all about making editing easier.
Happily, I use Git exclusively so I don’t have to deal with this issue but if I did, I’d probably do just what Dyer is doing. It makes sense to avoid context switches whenever you can and using more than one interface for version control is definitely a context switch.
I still don’t understand the urge to purge packages—except in special circumstances—but sometimes, as in Dyer’s case, it makes sense. To be clear, as I’ve said before, I don’t begrudge Dyer or anyone else the ability to configure Emacs the way they like. I’m only saying I don’t always understand the urge and it’s better to understand things than not. Or so I’ve been told.