Re: ELPA policy

[Achim Gratz]

John Wiegley writes:
>  3. There should be a defined subset of packages that get copied from ELPA
>     into the Emacs tarball during release, and an easy way to manage this list
>     for the core developers. That way, certain packages like seq.el and
>     stream.el can feel like "core" packages to users, when they are really
>     "external" packages from the point of view of the core developers.

They could (and probably should) effectively be in the build environment
as well.  In other words, I would try to not pull them into the release
tarball at the last possible moment.  One thing that would make
difficult is to test interactions between such "external core" packages
and here I have to agree with Eli that this has potential for
degradation of quality.

>   - allow the core maintainers to decide what exactly is going into "Emacs":
>     For example, I wouldn't want to pull Org releases into the distribution
>     from a submodule; I really do want a version of that source code to be in
>     ELPA, so we can separately patch if there are last minute problems.

You'd do that with branches if it really becomes necessary.  I don't
really see why submodules could not be used, except for the extra rope
they give you to hang yourself with.  Any other solution is going to
have the same basic complexity beneath and the potential to not work on
some platform or other.

> ELPA should thus benefit core developers by reducing load, and benefit package
> maintainers by being an easier platform for their contributions and their
> users. If it causes extra work for anyone, that's something I'd want to
> change.

I maintain that ELPA should benefit Emacs users first.

>   b. That we move "external" packages from core into ELPA, starting with the
>      really big ones;

...after the necessary changes to Emacs' build system and package.el are
architected and implemented.


Regards,
Achim.
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