Re: "Write a new package" culture instead of patches?

["Clément Pit-Claudel" <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>]

On 18/05/2020 11.22, Yoni Rabkin wrote:
> I'm the maintainer of GNU/Emms (a media player for Emacs). The people
> who distribute Emms on MELPA do a poor job of it (see below), and have
> never communicated with us, the Emms developers about it (not even
> once). I only discovered about it by chance recently when I went out to
> figure out what M/ELPA is, and how I can add Emms to ELPA.
> 
> What the MEPLA people are doing that I don't like:

I think you're a bit harsh with the MELPA folks. EMMS was added to MELPA eight years ago, back when it was just getting started, so I wouldn't judge based on that.  See below re. contacting package authors.

>     * Associate Emms with several Emms extensions that live only on
>       MELPA and that we, the Emms developers, have never heard
>       about. This would give anyone accessing Emms via MELPA that those
>       extensions are somehow a part of Emms, when they are not.

What do you mean by this?  MELPA is the same as ELPA in this regard: anyone can publish an "emms-xyz" package, right?

>     * Not even linking to the Emms home page
>       (https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/).

I think it does: I see this when I open the package in M-x list-packages:

   Homepage: https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/

The MELPA website links to the git repository instead.

> Ideas for improvement:
> 
>     * Encourage people to speak to the developers of a project before
>       packaging it.

The current guidelines say the following:

Contact package author
    If you are not the original author or maintainer of the package you are submitting, please notify the authors prior to submitting and include them in the pull request process.

… so things have indeed improved a lot since 2012.

>     * Find a way of packaging a project as-is. For instance, Emms could
>       be distributed as is, and the M/ELPA software could simply point
>       at where Emms keeps its .el files for Emacs to find. This is
>       instead of how I see ELPA working now, which is to force the
>       software through a kind of a sieve (I think ELPA calls it a
>       recipe) where only a select few files come out the other end.

It's trivial to make a recipe that includes all files, so I wouldn't worry about this.

>       Emms doesn't need a recipe; it already comes organized and
>       packaged for working with Emacs.

I think most users these days expect "packaged" to mean "installable using package.el", while EMMS only provides source releases; that's why you see the MELPA recipe slicing and dicing the emms repo.

It will be great to have an improved EMMS recipe in MELPA!  If you run into trouble, you should ask on the bug tracker; the MELPA folks are great.

Cheers,
Clément.