Magit is one of the most powerful pieces of software I use on a daily basis. It's incredibly well designed and I'd be seriously lost without it. That said, I th

Magit is one of the most powerful pieces of software I use on a daily basis. It's incredibly well designed and I'd be seriously lost without it. That said, I think it's a good thing for MELPA and package.el in general that it's not built-in. It's a killer app, and I can only assume it encourages people to explore more packages. I also totally agree with the post about contributing. Assignments aren't even the major issue, it's that with magit you can discuss issues, send a PR on GitHub and have a patch included in no-time. As part of Emacs, we'd have to go through mailing-list hell for any discussion and that's before considering the difficulties of actually getting a patch pulled in, at which point most people will have to wait for a new release? As part of MELPA I can update as soon as the PR is merged in. Strange that people complain about the packaging system — I find it does the job and is super easy to get updates.