Re: rainbow-mode

[Glenn Morris]

Chong Yidong wrote:

> as Stefan says, all things being equal, it is preferable to put new
> non-infrastructure packages into elpa.gnu.org.

This is a pretty big change in policy, IMO. Who's going to maintain
these things? Where do the bug reports go? If it were in Emacs proper,
I could and would (maybe) be fixing any bugs in it, improving docs,
etc. If it's in elpa.gnu.org, I'm unlikely to ever even look at the
code. And if I did and wanted to change something, all I have is a
tarfile (no?), the repository lives somewhere else, and I'm unlikely
to bother seeking it out, submitting a patch, etc.

I tried the elpa interface and it seems very nifty, but I do share the
concerns expressed about what it all means in practice for the
maintenance of the associated packages. As an "easy way to get a
package that would otherwise not be in Emacs" (eg AUCTeX), it seems
really nice; for farming out things that otherwise _would_ be in
Emacs proper, not so much.

Some of these issues would go away if these "non-infrastructure"
packages (not AUCTeX etc, but rather the things that would have been
added to Emacs before elpa) were hosted in a central Savannah bzr
repository (or possible as a subdirectory in the existing Emacs
repository that is excluded from the tarfiles; I'm not sure if the
number of files in the Bzr version of Emacs matters very much), so
that the Emacs developers can and do feel able to help maintain them.
>From my point of, the ideal thing would be something like a separate
top-level "elpa/" directory in the normal repo, not compiled by
default, that I could compile with `make elpa' or somesuch.

Then putting something on elpa doesn't mean relegating it to being a
second-class citizen.