Re: ELPA policy

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Stephen Leake <address@hidden> writes:

> I think the distinction between "tarball package" and "core package" is
> helpful here.
> 
> I'm guessing that the main motivation for including Org and Gnus in Emacs
> git (well, CVS back then?) was to include them in the release tarball. If we
> have a mechanism to allow that for ELPA packages, moving them to ELPA makes
> sense.

I like this. I think we have a good striation:

  core
  tarball ELPA
  net ELPA

To the user, core and tarball ELPA should be indistinguishable. I think also
that some tarball ELPA packages should come "pre-installed", if that is not
already done. This would makes them accessible via autoload, rather than
requiring the package interface to opt-in.

If core == tarball ELPA for everyone but us, this makes the decision easy
whether something should be in core or not a lot: We put it in core if core
requires it. If nothing at all in core uses the package -- and if that package
doesn't define "essential" functionality, like isearch.el or grep.el -- it can
shift to tarball ELPA.

This still leaves open the meaning of "essential", but it does make the
picture clearer.

John