Re: emacs packaging (emacs-popup)

[Federico Beffa]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 5:46 PM, Alex Kost <address@hidden> wrote:
> Federico Beffa (2016-02-15 15:12 +0300) wrote:
>
>> Nils Gillmann <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> I'm packaging emacs-popup.
>>>
>>> Currently the output builds with
>>> address@hidden ~/projects/guix_project/guix$ ls -al
>>> /gnu/store/knpjk9vflja0i6yhnz4ai57k29jpgm4p-emacs-popup-0.5.3/share/emacs/site-lisp/guix.d/popup-0.5.3/
>>> total 180
>>> dr-xr-xr-x 4 root guixbuild  4096 Jan  1  1970 ./
>>> dr-xr-xr-x 3 root guixbuild  4096 Jan  1  1970 ../
>>> -r--r--r-- 2 root guixbuild    90 Jan  1  1970 Cask
>>> dr-xr-xr-x 3 root guixbuild  4096 Jan  1  1970 etc/
>>> -r--r--r-- 2 root guixbuild    14 Jan  1  1970 .gitignore
>>> -r--r--r-- 2 root guixbuild   626 Jan  1  1970 Makefile
>>> -r--r--r-- 2 root guixbuild   334 Jan  1  1970 popup-autoloads.el
>>> -r--r--r-- 2 root guixbuild 54848 Jan  1  1970 popup.el
>>> -r--r--r-- 2 root guixbuild 75474 Jan  1  1970 popup.elc
>>> -r--r--r-- 2 root guixbuild 10187 Jan  1  1970 README.md
>>> dr-xr-xr-x 2 root guixbuild  4096 Jan  1  1970 tests/
>>> -r--r--r-- 2 root guixbuild   569 Jan  1  1970 .travis.yml
>>>
>>> Can this be improved, ie remove some of the files to clean it up,
>>> or is it all good?
>>
>> I would suggest to move the README.md (and in general documentation
>> related files) to $datadir/doc/package-name-version/. Info files to
>> $datadir/info/package-name-version/. Take a look at 'emacs-slime'.
>>
>> Remove unused files like .gitignore, ...
>
> I don't agree.  This is not done for any other emacs package.  I think
> ".gitignore" and other files should not be removed in a package recipe.
> This is a job for emacs-build-system, and I thought it was agreed¹.  So
> I think this "emacs-popup" package can be left as it is now, and once
> our emacs-build-system will be improved (to remove useless file, to move
> README into share/doc, etc.), it will be fixed automatically.
>
> ¹ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-07/msg00416.html

Doing so will break some packages. One example is 'emacs-slime' which
includes .lisp and .asd files, other ones are 'emacs-auctex' and
'emacs-ob-ipython', ...

While we could add a phase to remove some pretty common and useless
files such as .gitignore, in general things are not standardized and
more complex. Unless upstream fixes this situation it will be
impossible to make a perfect 'emacs-build-system'.

Checking the code to remind myself of the details, the only thing
about non .el files that it does, is to move info files to the
appropriate directory.

Regards,
Fede