Re: Info Pages for ELPA packages

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

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

> The situation w.r.t to documentation of ELPA packages indeed could be
> improved at various stages:
> - Many packages don't have much documentation.  That's also true of many
>   Elisp packages bundled with Emacs, but it's probably more true of
>   ELPA packages.  We could encourage people to provide docs, but that
>   problem seems different from the one you raise.
> - Some have documentation but it's not made easily accessible to
>   the user.  This is because the GNU ELPA infrastructure is fairly
>   limited in this respect:
>   - package.el only knows how to use an Info doc and only if the package
>     comes with a "dir" file.
>   - the GNU ELPA scripts don't know how to build Info files nor "dir" files.
>
> So improving the GNU ELPA scripts to generate the Info and "dir" files
> would probably be a good first step.  If you have specific packages
> which included docs in the Git repo but no Info&dir files, please send
> them along, they'll be helpful to try and figure out how those scripts
> could/should work.

I think it would be *really* helpful to ask that developers write README
files, even if they can't be bothered to write a full Info manual. Being
able to hit "?" in the *Packages* buffer and get a description of a
package *before* you install it is invaluable. Half the time you can
barely tell what a package does from the description, nor do you know
the most basic invocation for getting it up and running. I'd almost
think a README should be a requirement...

2¢

Eric