Re: Future role of ELPA

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Stefan Reichör <address@hidden> writes:

> My main concern with GNU ELPA is that I have to install a lot of extra
> packages manually using the package manager. When they are built-in they are
> just there.

Hi Stefan,

Have no fear: I never use package.el myself, since I also prefer to curate
hand-installed packages.

So what does moving to ELPA mean?

There would be a large set of ELPA packages (maybe all of them to start) that
will appear in the tarball when you download and install Emacs. This means --
I think -- that they should populate the site-wide site-lisp directory, and
appear to users as if they had come "with Emacs"; that is, either autoloading
or a manual `require' statement to make the functionality available.

There are a few advantages to this:

  1. After installation of Emacs, package.el can be used to upgrade select
     packages independent of our release cycle.

  2. Developers can get packages into the Emacs distribution without having to
     justification inclusion in core.

  3. Code "in development" is free to appear in ELPA, whereas we tend to frown
     on APIs that will change often in Emacs itself.

The bottom line is that, as a user, you shouldn't notice much difference after
installation, but you'll gain the benefit of optionally performing frequent
updates of ELPA packages. As an Emacs developer, the advantage is that it
simplifies the Emacs Git repository, and makes it easier for external authors
to focus on maintaining their packages within ELPA.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2

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