matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Uwe Brauer]

Hello

I got the impression that MELPA is bit delicate a subject, since it is
not GNU software, however matlab mode, which I partially maintain now, cannot
be put in ELPA since we do not posses all the signatures of all
contributors, so I have to use MELPA instead.

Matlab mode now is under git either in sourceforge or mirrored it
github, but I have 2 problems,

    - first: when running M-x package-list-packages for matlab there is
     no summary.
    - usually a package in MELPA, such as for example auto-capitalise.el
      comes with

 auto-capitalize-autoloads.el
 and  auto-capitalize-pkg.el

Both files are not generated for matlab mode in MELPA, although
matlab.el has a summary line. I presume the recipe file is not correct
but I don't know where to look it up or whom to ask.

Could someone please provide me with link or information?

thanks

Uwe Brauer 

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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On 04/15/2016 05:46 AM, Uwe Brauer wrote:
> Hello
> Matlab mode now is under git either in sourceforge or mirrored it
> github, but I have 2 problems,
> 
>     - first: when running M-x package-list-packages for matlab there is
>      no summary.
>     - usually a package in MELPA, such as for example auto-capitalise.el
>       comes with

A quick look at git://git.code.sf.net/p/matlab-emacs/src suggests that you don't have a matlab-pkg.el. See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Multi_002dfile-Packages.html for more info on that.

Clément.


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Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Stefan Monnier]

> I got the impression that MELPA is bit delicate a subject, since it is
> not GNU software,

I think we should make it clear here that MELPA is not (or should not
be) a delicate subject.  It's a great success story of package.el, and
is an extremely important part of the Emacs landscape.  We should work
to make it even better.  E.g. on Emacs's side, there are some serious
issues w.r.t conflicting version numbers between GNU ELPA and MELPA.
Also, the package.el UI is not really up to the task of handling the
number of packages in MELPA.  We need to add support for things like
keywords/tags, as well as non-dependency links between packages
(e.g. "recommends", "replaces", "see also", "alternative to").

> however matlab mode, which I partially maintain now, cannot be put in
> ELPA since we do not posses all the signatures of all contributors, so
> I have to use MELPA instead.

My hope/desire for matlab-mode would be to try and merge it bit-by-bit
with octave-mode.  More specifically, octave-mode would accumulate all
the code that is not specific to Matlab, and matlab-mode would remain as
a package which depends on octave-mode and adds some
matlab-specific support.

>  auto-capitalize-autoloads.el
>  and  auto-capitalize-pkg.el
> Both files are not generated for matlab mode in MELPA,

GNU ELPA's scripts auto-generate <pkg>-pkg.el nowadays, but maybe
MELPA's don't.
As for <pkg>-autoloads.el this file is not part of the distributed
package, instead it's generated locally on the client during installation.

[ Sorry, can't help you much with the MELPA setup, because I'm not
  familiar with it.  ]


        Stefan

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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On 04/15/2016 08:32 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> GNU ELPA's scripts auto-generate <pkg>-pkg.el nowadays, but maybe
> MELPA's don't.

Indeed, they don't for packages that have more than one file. Cask can do it, though.


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Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Uwe Brauer]

   > On 04/15/2016 05:46 AM, Uwe Brauer wrote:

   > A quick look at git://git.code.sf.net/p/matlab-emacs/src suggests that
   > you don't have a matlab-pkg.el. See
   > https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Multi_002dfile-Packages.html
   > for more info on that.

Thanks. That site you mention also talks about generating a tar file,
but this is ELPA specific, no?


   > Clément.

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Uwe Brauer]

>>> "Stefan" == Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

   >> I got the impression that MELPA is bit delicate a subject, since it is
   >> not GNU software,

   >> however matlab mode, which I partially maintain now, cannot be put in
   >> ELPA since we do not posses all the signatures of all contributors, so
   >> I have to use MELPA instead.

   > My hope/desire for matlab-mode would be to try and merge it bit-by-bit
   > with octave-mode.  More specifically, octave-mode would accumulate all
   > the code that is not specific to Matlab, and matlab-mode would remain as
   > a package which depends on octave-mode and adds some
   > matlab-specific support.

Agreed. I used octave quite some time ago and what I noticed was that
the command shell interface was clearly inferior to that of matlab.
However the matlab code was so, well matlab specific, that it was
frustrating for me to try to import that code to octave.

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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On 04/15/2016 11:10 AM, Uwe Brauer wrote:
> 
>    > On 04/15/2016 05:46 AM, Uwe Brauer wrote:
> 
>    > A quick look at git://git.code.sf.net/p/matlab-emacs/src suggests that
>    > you don't have a matlab-pkg.el. See
>    > https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Multi_002dfile-Packages.html
>    > for more info on that.
> 
> Thanks. That site you mention also talks about generating a tar file,
> but this is ELPA specific, no?

Not really; it's specific to the distribution part, which you don't care about. From the metadata in the headers (for single-file packages) or in …-pkg.el (for multi-file packages) MELPA will build a tar files that users download through package.el.

Cheers,
Clément


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Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Uwe Brauer]

   > On 04/15/2016 11:10 AM, Uwe Brauer wrote:

   > Not really; it's specific to the distribution part, which you don't
   > care about. From the metadata in the headers (for single-file
   > packages) or in …-pkg.el (for multi-file packages) MELPA will build a
   > tar files that users download through package.el.
Ok thanks.

I am sorry to nag, but I find the lack of some manual frustrating.

If I understand correctly, all I have to do is  to provide a file
matlab-pkg.el, then automatically the info string will be updated.

But I am not sure about its contend. Looking up in packages I installed
from MELPA such as

 helm-bibtex-pkg.el

 does not really help because it contains strings I presume are
 generated during installation, namely the string  "20160412.1353" as in 
,----
| 
| (define-package "helm-bibtex" "20160412.1353" "A BibTeX bibliography manager based on Helm"
|   '((helm "1.5.5")
|     (parsebib "1.0")
|     (s "1.9.0")
|     (dash "2.6.0")
|     (f "0.16.2")
|     (cl-lib "0.5")
|     (biblio "0.2")))
| ;; Local Variables:
| ;; no-byte-compile: t
| ;; End:
`----

So based on this how should matlab-pkg.el look?

 For example

,----
| ;;; -*- no-byte-compile: t -*-
| (define-package "matlab-mode" "20131013.2205" "Major mode for MATLAB(R) dot-m files"
|   'nil
|   :keywords
|   '("matlab" "programming" "language" "(X)emacs"))
`----


Or


,----
| ;;; -*- no-byte-compile: t -*-
| (define-package "matlab-mode" " " "Major mode for MATLAB(R) dot-m files"
|   'nil
|   :keywords
|   '("matlab" "programming" "language" "(X)emacs"))
`----

Thanks 

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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On 04/15/2016 01:02 PM, Uwe Brauer wrote:
>    > On 04/15/2016 11:10 AM, Uwe Brauer wrote:
> 
>    > Not really; it's specific to the distribution part, which you don't
>    > care about. From the metadata in the headers (for single-file
>    > packages) or in …-pkg.el (for multi-file packages) MELPA will build a
>    > tar files that users download through package.el.
> Ok thanks.
> 
> I am sorry to nag, but I find the lack of some manual frustrating.

No problem. Happy to help when I can. Looking at this a bit more, I think what I said earlier needs to be slightly amended. If you have a file whose name matches your package's name, if seems that MELPA will use its headers to generate a package description. Since you don't have a matlab-mode.el, though, MELPA doesn't know where to look.

You can just create a matlab-mode-pkg.el file, and it will grab information from there. I don't generally write these -pkg files by hand. Instead, I just use Cask (https://github.com/cask/cask) to generate them for me.

> If I understand correctly, all I have to do is  to provide a file
> matlab-pkg.el, then automatically the info string will be updated.

matlab-mode-pkg.el, right?

> But I am not sure about its contend. Looking up in packages I installed
> from MELPA (...) does not really help

You could take a look at https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/blob/master/helm-pkg.el for an example. Here are other examples from my packages:

https://github.com/cpitclaudel/company-coq/blob/master/company-coq-pkg.el
https://github.com/cpitclaudel/biblio.el/blob/master/biblio-pkg.el

The docs of that define-package forms are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Multi_002dfile-Packages.html . Your confusion regarding version numbers is due to MELPA editing the pkg file when it packages your software. MELPA packages use a different versioning namespace based on the packaging date. IOW, when your package is finally built, MELPA will replace its real version number by the current date and time.


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Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Uwe Brauer]

    > On 04/15/2016 01:02 PM, Uwe Brauer wrote:

    > No problem. Happy to help when I can. Looking at this a bit more, I
    > think what I said earlier needs to be slightly amended. If you have a
    > file whose name matches your package's name, if seems that MELPA will
    > use its headers to generate a package description. Since you don't
    > have a matlab-mode.el, though, MELPA doesn't know where to look.

    > You can just create a matlab-mode-pkg.el file, and it will grab
    > information from there. I don't generally write these -pkg files by
    > hand. Instead, I just use Cask (https://github.com/cask/cask) to
    > generate them for me.

Ok, I just tried out elpakit (from marmelade) and run into problems. I
think I will old fashioned and generate this file manually.

    > matlab-mode-pkg.el, right?


    > You could take a look at
    > https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/blob/master/helm-pkg.el for an
aha, so you are the author of these great helm packages!
Thanks for providing them.

    > example. Here are other examples from my packages:

thanks, very much, that was very helpful. I finally opted for

;;; matlab-pkg.el --- define matlab for package.el
(define-package "matlab-mode" "3.3.5" "Major mode for MATLAB(R) dot-m files"
  'nil
  :keywords
  '("matlab" "programming" "language" "(X)emacs")
  :url "http://sourceforge.net/projects/matlab-emacs/"
  )


Hope it will work out.

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

Is someone making an effort to find the contributors to matlab-mode.el?
How much code do we not have papers for?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Uwe Brauer]

>>> "Richard" == 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. ]]]

    > Is someone making an effort to find the contributors to matlab-mode.el?
    > How much code do we not have papers for?

On the matlab mailing list we discussed some weeks ago whether to put
the code in EPLA or MELPA, if memory serves me well, then Eric Ludlam,
the maintainer for the last 20 years told us, that there are many
contributors who did not sign papers (and I presume he has no way to
contact them again). I will however ask him again and try to see what I
can do to contact those people.

However I just found a line in matlab.el which worries me

;; Copyright (C) 2004-2010, 2014 The Mathworks, Inc
;; Copyright (C) 1997-2004 Eric M. Ludlam: The MathWorks, Inc
;; Copyright (C) 1991-1997 Matthew R. Wette

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

As long as access to MELPA requires running nonfree software, we must
not say anything good about it, or even talk about it much here.  Whatever success it has is regrettable.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Nicolas Petton]

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Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> As long as access to MELPA requires running nonfree software, we must
> not say anything good about it, or even talk about it much here.

(putting the MELPA maintainer in the Cc)

Richard,

I do not follow you here. AFAICT MELPA is free software, licensed under
GPL3, you can read the LICENSE file here:
https://github.com/melpa/melpa/blob/master/LICENSE.md

This includes the JavaScript code
(https://github.com/melpa/melpa/blob/master/html/js/melpa.js).

I think, but I might be wrong, that you are referring to compatibility
with LibreJS.

If LibreJS cannot determine that the JavaScript files are free, that is
another issue, but it does not make it nonfree.

Maybe I misunderstood you?

Nico

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Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Stefan Monnier]

> As long as access to MELPA requires running nonfree software, we must
> not say anything good about it, or even talk about it much here.
> Whatever success it has is regrettable.

I have no reason to believe that it's non-free and AFAIK his maintainer
does intend it to be Free, so I see no reason to try and alienate him.


        Stefan

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Stefan Monnier]

> As long as access to MELPA requires running nonfree software,

To access MELPA, all you need is to set your
`package-archives` variable.  After that, it's all handled by Emacs.
No Javascript involved, even.  So please stop maligning it.


        Stefan

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Tom]

Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr> writes:
> 
> If LibreJS cannot determine that the JavaScript files are free, that is
> another issue, but it does not make it nonfree.

According to a reddit thread there is a ticket already for 
librejs:

https://github.com/melpa/melpa/issues/3731

The reddit commenter says the librejs folks are not really responsive.

Librejs is only a tool which judgment should not be trusted blindly,
because it can also have issues like any other software.

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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Hey Richard,

On 04/18/2016 04:31 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> As long as access to MELPA requires running nonfree software, we must
> not say anything good about it, or even talk about it much here.

Fortunately, access to MELPA does not require running nonfree software.

Are you maybe confusing the MELPA website and MELPA itself? That wouldn't make the objection any more valid, of course, since the website is free software as well (just not properly detected by LibreJS).

In any case, MELPA is a package archive. You access it with package.el, without running any MELPA-specific code.

> Whatever success it has is regrettable.

Making such harsh statement without a basis in fact is regrettable too.

Cheers,
Clément.



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Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

http://melpa.org/ contains this Javascript code with no license

    <script type="text/javascript">!function(d,s,id){var
      js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,
      'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script>

It also loads https://fr.amiando.com/resources/js/amiandoExport.js
which seems to be source code, with no license.

Those are clearly nonfree; it is no error for LibreJS to think so.

The page also loads /js/bootstrap.min.js.  I tried to fetch
http://melpa.org/js/bootstrap.min.js but that doesn't work.
I suppose it needs to be loaded from some other site.

It also loads
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.1.min.js,
but that is free software and no problem.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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On 04/18/2016 08:29 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> http://melpa.org/ contains this Javascript code with no license
> 
> ...

Are we looking at the same page? I see a Google Analytics tracker, but nothing related to Twitter in http://melpa.org/. I'm not seeing anything related to https://fr.amiando.com/resources/js/amiandoExport.js in there either.

Clément.


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Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Steve Purcell]

> On 19 Apr 2016, at 12:29, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> http://melpa.org/ contains this Javascript code with no license
> 
>    <script type="text/javascript">!function(d,s,id){var
>      js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,
>      'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script>

Our source code does not contain that snippet: it is inserted at runtime by https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js. That particular 3rd-party javascript, which I am not aware to be free, can be cheerfully blocked by LibreJS without causing the site to degrade. (The same goes for Google Analytics.)


> It also loads https://fr.amiando.com/resources/js/amiandoExport.js
> which seems to be source code, with no license.

No, our site does not load that script. I suspect that this is due to a browser extension you are running — they frequently side-load further libraries.


> Those are clearly nonfree; it is no error for LibreJS to think so.
> 
> The page also loads /js/bootstrap.min.js.  I tried to fetch
> http://melpa.org/js/bootstrap.min.js but that doesn't work.
> I suppose it needs to be loaded from some other site.

No, we do not mention or attempt to load that resource. I suspect a browser extension again.


> It also loads
> http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.1.min.js,
> but that is free software and no problem.

Nope, we don't load jquery either.

These points have been confirmed by auditing the code and testing in several browsers.


So with those points addressed, here's the situation re. LibreJS and the javascript we *do* use:

- We have merged some website changes which mark up all our free javascript for the convenience of LibreJS.
- LibreJS still complains about “cookies.js” because we are waiting for the maintainers to confirm permissibility of the liberal "unlicence” it uses. So far they have been unresponsive. [1]

When that LibreJS issue is cleared up, you will be able to use that extension to more reliably confirm for yourself that no non-free software is required to access melpa.org.

Regards,

Steve

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-librejs/2016-04/msg00000.html

Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Nicolas Petton]

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Steve Purcell <steve@sanityinc.com> writes:

>> It also loads https://fr.amiando.com/resources/js/amiandoExport.js
>> which seems to be source code, with no license.
>
> No, our site does not load that script. I suspect that this is due to
> a browser extension you are running — they frequently side-load
> further libraries.

Thanks Steve for the clarifications.

Still, I find it really sad that because LibreJS is unable to detect
that some JavaScript code is free, websites are wrongly being considered
nonfree.  Even worse, some of these websites are completely unusable
with this plugin, while they are using Free Software!

LibreJS is a just browser plugin, I consider it a very bad move to use
it to determine if some source code is free or not, it obviously has
serious limitations that make it completely unreliable and unusable for
me.

Nico

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Re: matlab-mode MELPA, link contact FAQ?

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

The browser I sued was wget.  I don't think it has any plug-ins
that modify the code.

However, I did that on another machine (I always do so), and this time
I got confused about the file name it put the page in.  I fetched the
page again just now, and got totally different contents.  I'm sorry
for that mistake.

There still seems to be a problem.  Here's what I see: five files,
plus Google Analytics tracking malware (though there's an easy
solution for that -- IceCat won't run it).

  <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mithril/0.2.0/mithril.min.js"></script>
  <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/moment.js/2.8.4/moment.min.js"></script>
  <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/lodash.js/2.4.1/lodash.min.js"></script>
  <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/Cookies.js/1.1.0/cookies.min.js"></script>
  <script src="js/melpa.js"></script>

<script>
  (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
  (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
  m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
  })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

  ga('create', 'UA-39278673-2', 'auto');
  ga('send', 'pageview');

</script>

I will now fetch those pages and see what I get.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.