Re: What is GNU ELPA?

[Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net>]

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. ]]]
>
>   > >     Most people (somewhat wrongly) think of GNU ELPA as a *distribution*
>   > >     site for third party packages, like MELPA.
>   > > 
>   > > 
>   > > I just wanted to confirm that it's indeed the case for a lot of users.
>
> What do we say now to explain what GNU ELPA is?
> And where do we say it?
> Will users see that explanation
> in the normal workflow of using packages from GNU ELPA?

In case it is an interesting data point, ELPA may be invisible and
un-discoverable to many Emacs users. Here is why I think this may be the
case:

I've been using Emacs for decades, and I use it every day for my living
(read: Emacs is crucial to me and my family). I have a few packages
installed in an ~/elisp/ directory and I load those manually via my
~/.emacs.

Over all of these years I have never had Emacs ask, offer, or otherwise
point out ELPA. The only reason I know it even exists is because as a
GNU maintainer of some emacs extensions, people sometimes asked my why
those extensions are not in ELPA. At that point, I needed to try and
figure out what ELPA even was (not to mention what MELPA was, and what
the difference is between them.)

This is good for me because it means that I have never been bothered by
Emacs telling me that I need to change my setup and use ELPA instead of
what I'm currently using. I want that to continue being the case, as I
do not anticipate ELPA ever being relevant to me personally. Emacs isn't
a hobby for me; it is a tool I use to earn a salary.

However, I am guessing that this may be bad news for people who love and
support ELPA, since it means that it is effectively invisible to many
emacs users like me. I certainly can't speak on the behalf of the ELPA
people, but perhaps they should be thinking about how to explain to
emacs users what ELPA is, or why we should even care. If they can show
me how ELPA can make Emacs better for my work, then ELPA may become very
important to me. Otherwise, I have no incentive to break my current
setup, which is precious to me, in order to try out something that may
or may not be better.

Please don't take this as criticism of ELPA or the efforts of the people
who work on it, as it is not intended to be one. Instead, I wanted to
share my real-world use of Emacs in relation to ELPA, in case it would
be a valuable data-point for the people who are considering the question
in the subject of the thread: "What is GNU ELPA?"


-- 
   "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"