Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com>
> Cc: stefankangas@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2021 23:48:57 +0800
> 
> >   If you would like to contribute a stand-alone package, consider
> >   submitting it to ELPA, not to Emacs.
> >
> > Would that be enough?
> 
> I don't think so. It's clear how to contribute a stand-alone package.
> The confusion comes when someone wants to contribute a built-in package
> yet widely available ahead of Emacs next release or in older Emacs.

Then let's tell what should be done in order to contribute such a
package.  If this is already described in the ELPA documentation, it
should be enough to point contributors that are interested in this
there; if ELPA doesn't describe it, perhaps it should, or we could say
something in CONTRIBUTE, assuming it could be said succinctly enough.

But the proposed change didn't do any of that, AFAICT.

> A real example: RMS recently asked Org ML about splitting Org mode into
> modules and integrating them into Emacs code proper. And we do have some
> modules that could be integrated into Emacs: recent org-persist was
> written with RMS request in mind; upcoming redesign of folding system
> will have a universal module for text folding; some parts of Org parser
> could be reused in the code (we have incremental parser equivalent to
> tree-sitter implemented fully in Elisp).
> 
> However, without knowing that built-in Emacs packages can be distributed
> via ELPA, the above is difficult to achieve. Org promises to support
> older Emacs versions and we cannot rely on all the users using master
> version of Emacs (we cannot even rely on latest Emacs release).

CONTRIBUTE cannot possibly answer all the questions that could arise,
and cannot hold ready recipes for every possible real-life case.  We
can only tell so much there.  Eventually, you need to talk to the
maintainers about the details, and the maintainers already know about
this factoid.

> >> 6. ELPA section is very confusing with this mindset (and in general as
> >>    well).
> >
> > I find nothing confusing there.  All it says is that the Emacs
> > repository doesn't include ELPA, which is a separate repository with
> > its own README file.
> >
> > IOW, all it wants is to prevent people from mistakenly thinking
> > CONTRIBUTE and emacs.git in general cover ELPA.
> 
> The confusion is for the users who do not know what is GNU ELPA.

They should follow the link, and then they will know.  This text is
for those who _do_ know about ELPA, but might make a mistake of
thinking ELPA and Emacs use the same repository and completely share
the development rules and conventions.