Re: feature/package-vc has been merged

[Philip Kaludercic]

Björn Bidar <bjorn.bidar@thaodan.de> writes:

> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
>> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
>> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>>
>> Please do not encourage people to load packages from MELPA.  MELPA
>> does not cooperate with us.  Not in legal matters, not in ethical
>> matters, and not in technical matters of development.
>
> What justifies this kind of gaslighting against Melpa? 

Wikipedia defines gaslighting as:

    Gaslighting is a colloquialism, loosely defined as manipulating
    someone so as to make them question their own reality [...]

so I am not sure how this applies to this thread.

>                                                        You might not
> like to hear it but without Melpa Emacs wouldn't be were it is now..

This is a counterfactual discussion, because it cannot be said if MELPA
was a necessary or contingent fact.  I agree that MELPA provided an
important service in collecting the number of packages that it did, but
if NonGNU ELPA had been created over 10 years ago with the regular GNU
ELPA, perhaps it would have been enough?

That being said, if I had a single-use time machine I wouldn't waste it
on finding out insignificant something like this.

>> A given package that happens to be in MELPA may be perfectly fine in
>> and of itself, or it may have problems of one kind of the other.
>>
>> If you come across a package in MELPA that has no particular problems,
>> we can DTRT to put it in either GNU ELPA or NonGNU ELPA.
>
> It's perfectly fine that is on Melpa, not everyone likes the mailing
> list based approach of Gnu.
> Offer other options such as a Gitlab or Gitea instance instead of
> antiquated Savanah (or make it more modern in other ways)
> and people might move elsewhere.

I am afraid you have some misunderstandings regarding GNU ELPA (and I
suppose NonGNU ELPA as well).  GNU ELPA packages can and often are
developed on PR-based forges, where the state is synchronised into
elpa.git/nongnu.git, where the packages are build and distributed.
There is no need to use mailing lists -- except maybe to announce a
package and to request it be added to an archive.  But am I understating
your correctly that that is really the point you are objecting to?