Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Jorgen Schaefer]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2014 18:58:21 -0500
Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:

>         Stefan "who'd be happy to hear more about the hurdles to
>                 integration of elpy into GNU ELPA"

Well, one hurdle is that I haven't found a document that explains what
requirements there are to get a package into GNU ELPA. I know from
reading this list that copyright assignment is required (which is a bit
annoying for new contributors) and that it somehow involves pushing to
a git repo.

But the main reason I haven't even looked at it any further is that
elpy currently depends on a number of packages that are not in GNU
ELPA. Specifically:

- auto-complete
- find-file-in-project
- highlight-indentation
- iedit
- nose

Additionally, there has been some pressure from users to replace
flymake with flycheck, which is also not in Emacs nor GNU ELPA.

(Well, and until recently there was virtualenv, but I replaced that with
my own pyvenv which I could contribute to GNU ELPA quite easily.)

From reading this list, I got the impression that GNU packages shouldn't
suggest using third-party package archives because they usually do not
care about promoting free software, so I can not simply ask users to
add e.g. Marmalade and get the packages from there.

I plan to add some kind of extension handling mechanism in elpy to
enable/disable optional dependencies, but haven't progressed much in
figuring out how to do this well while keeping the general idea of elpy
to "install it and it just works". And of course that requires some
time to actually implement it.

Regards,
Jorgen