Re: Emacs Package Management

[Phil Hagelberg <phil@hagelb.org>]

Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:

>> One way to do it would be to have every package register as a Savannah
>> project, and have some kind of operation (probably implemented as an
>> elisp function) that could produce the static files that package.el
>> consumes and place them in a publicly accessible http-served
>> directory. Making package releases correspond with VCS tags would
>> simplify things, so with some kind of post-commit hooks Savannah could
>> run this function whenever a tag is updated in the project.
>>
>> This would require very few changes to package.el. Writing such a
>> function should not be difficult. The only question is how easy it would
>> be to get Savannah to run it at the right time.
>
> We're not necessarily restricted to Savannah; if necessary, we might be
> able to use the gnu.org ftp servers, and their mirrors (which we
> currently already use for distributing the monolithic tarball, after
> all).

I think Stefan had a great point that a lot of complexity involving
user, project, and release management can be sidestepped by using the
existing infrastructure of a version-control system. Savannah seems to
be a good fit for this, but if we can host an Emacs-package-specific VCS
somewhere else, that would work too.

-Phil