Re: emacs-27 efd4e97: Reflect the emacs-devel ELPA/MELPA dispute in FAQ

Re: emacs-27 efd4e97: Reflect the emacs-devel ELPA/MELPA dispute in FAQ

[Dmitry Gutov]

Hi Eli,

On 16.05.2020 10:32, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> @@ -3479,7 +3479,10 @@ There are other, non-GNU, Emacs Lisp package servers, including:
>   @uref{https://marmalade-repo.org, Marmalade}.  To use additional

Should we also remove the mention of Marmalade altogether? It's really 
defunct these days. And it was in no way special regarding the "non-free 
software" situation.

There are few alternatives, but mentioning MELPA Stable 
(https://stable.melpa.org/) is one option.

Re: emacs-27 efd4e97: Reflect the emacs-devel ELPA/MELPA dispute in FAQ

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Sat, 16 May 2020 23:09:15 +0300
> 
> On 16.05.2020 10:32, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > @@ -3479,7 +3479,10 @@ There are other, non-GNU, Emacs Lisp package servers, including:
> >   @uref{https://marmalade-repo.org, Marmalade}.  To use additional
> 
> Should we also remove the mention of Marmalade altogether?

I don't have an opinion about this.  We should probably ask users.
Alternatively, we could say in the FAQ that Marmalade is old and
unmaintained, and leave it to the readers to decide what to do with
that.

Re: emacs-27 efd4e97: Reflect the emacs-devel ELPA/MELPA dispute in FAQ

[chad]

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On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 7:31 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> > Date: Sat, 16 May 2020 23:09:15 +0300
> >
> > On 16.05.2020 10:32, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > @@ -3479,7 +3479,10 @@ There are other, non-GNU, Emacs Lisp package
> servers, including:
> > >   @uref{https://marmalade-repo.org, Marmalade}.  To use additional
> >
> > Should we also remove the mention of Marmalade altogether?
>
> I don't have an opinion about this.  We should probably ask users. [...]
>

IMHO, we should remove the mention of Marmalade.

Marmalade is unsupported enough that it causes security warnings due to its
certificate having expired. Attempting to visit the web page will generate
various scary error messages in basically every browser (including eww),
and the EmacsWiki page on it has this to say:

Marmalade <https://marmalade-repo.org/> was an ELPA
> <https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA> compatible package repository that
> allowed users to upload their own packages. Package maintainers did not
> have to be the same as the maintainers of the original code. This is
> somewhat like major GNU/Linux distributions.
>


The repository had availability problems and is now discontinued.
>

Hope that helps,
~Chad

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Re: emacs-27 efd4e97: Reflect the emacs-devel ELPA/MELPA dispute in FAQ

[Adam Porter]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> There are few alternatives, but mentioning MELPA Stable
> (https://stable.melpa.org/) is one option.

Please don't encourage users to use MELPA Stable.  There's already
enough users using it under false pretenses, thinking it's like MELPA's
version of Debian Stable, when it's actually more like Debian oldstable
if it were used together with Debian current-stable backports--IOW an
often-outdated set of packages mixed with some newer ones in unexpected,
sometimes incompatible ways.

For more discussion, see https://github.com/melpa/melpa/issues/6656 and
the other discussions linked there.

Re: emacs-27 efd4e97: Reflect the emacs-devel ELPA/MELPA dispute in FAQ

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 17.05.2020 06:53, Adam Porter wrote:
> For more discussion, seehttps://github.com/melpa/melpa/issues/6656  and
> the other discussions linked there.

Interesting thread, thank you.

Regarding encouragement of MELPA Stable, the issue is moot now that 
Richard removed the whole paragraph.