Re: ELPA policy

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> From: Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2015 05:51:16 +0200
> 
> On 11/09/2015 05:42 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> >> Imagine someone implements an awesome new feature for dired.  Emacs
> >> users the world over are amazed by this, and fill their blogs, twitter,
> >> etc. with the news.  If dired is an ELPA package, everyone who hears
> >> this news can get the new feature in their emacs instantly by upgrading
> >> their ELPA packages.  No need to wait N months for a new release of
> >> emacs, or compile a non-release version of emacs from git.
> >
> > How is this different when Dired is in the Emacs repository?  The
> > Emacs repository is a public one, so anyone and everyone can get the
> > latest version from there and use it, if they want.
> 
> a) That's a more involved endeavor than installing a package from ELPA. 
> And then you don't get the same conveniences, such as automatic updates.

Nothing prevents us from making the same arrangements in the Emacs
repository as we have in ELPA, and then users could add the Emacs
repository to their list of sites that package.el knows about.

Besides, most core packages don't need any elaborate setup, you just
drop them in and restart Emacs.

> b) There's a much higher probability that Dired depends on something 
> only the current development version of Emacs has. ELPA packages declare 
> their version requirements explicitly, and try not to break 
> compatibility with earlier versions without sufficient reasons.

How will that change if we move them outside Emacs?  It's not like
there's some magic at ELPA that just putting a package there magically
resolves all these issues.  And if someone will have to work on that,
she can do that without moving the package aside.

> > The suggestion was to move _all_ of them, except the few that are
> > needed for bootstrap, out of the Emacs repository.  Most of the
> > packages in that category are neither like Org nor like kermit.  They
> > are relatively small, but get quite a significant number of changes.
> 
> There were different suggestions, with different degrees between "let's 
> move Org and Gnus out" and "let's move everything out".

I didn't see any.