On the emacs-devel list they discussed recently[1] whether SLIME should be distributed with Emacs 24. Chong Yidong (he's one of the two Emacs lead maintainers) asked me who the contributors would be and I gave him a list with names and email addresses. I expected that he would give up because the list is too long :-), but he went on and asked those people if they are willing to assign copyrights to the FSF. Assigning copyrights is of course your own decision.
What I actually want to discuss is what people here think about distributing SLIME with Emacs and making that the "official" release. Since they only make Emacs releases every couple of years or so, we would probably have enough time to get our act together.
Gnus seems to be maintained by a different group than the Emacs core developers and is synchronized now and then with Emacs's trunk. I don't know how this would work us.
There's also the question how/if the Common Lisp part should be distributed. Including it with Emacs seems problematic, but separating it isn't attractive either.
I guess if SLIME were distributed with Emacs it would be a bit easier for us to get certain things fixed in Emacs (e.g. LOOP indentation) which so far have been ignored by the Emacs developers.
It seems like it would be more work than it's now but I don't want to close the door too early. What do others think about it? Are there any volunteers to do the syncing with Emacs?
Helmut