Adding Emms to ELPA (take 2), and a technical question

[Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net>]

Hello all, I'm the current Emms (https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/)
maintainer.

Back in October of 2014 I started the process of adding Emms to ELPA;
that exposed a lot of work that needed to be done. I've been receiving
multiple requests as of late to add Emms to ELPA, so I'm following it
up.

The main issue back then was that Emms was a copyright mess. Stefan
Monnier helped me figuring out who to contact and I've fixed that since
(took a while). To the best of my knowledge, everyone who has code in
Emms has an assignment on file. Emms has an AUTHORS file which is kept
up-to-date. Everyone there should also appear in the FSF records.

Stefan also said that ELPA packages need to have their .el files at the
top-level. However, Emms has its files in a lisp/ directory. This is
still the case, and I would like to keep it that way because Emms has a
lot of files and a lisp/ directory keeps things tidy. Is this still a
requirement for ELPA? I hope not.

Emms also comes with a small piece of code that needs to be compiled in
order to use taglib (https://taglib.org/). The code is in a src/
directory in the Emms distribution. I understand that there is no way to
get ELPA to compile something as a part of the installation. We can
forgo any compilation at the ELPA installation stage as long as people
get to read the excellent Emms manual which explains how (and why) to
compile that bit of code. Would any of this be a problem for adding Emms
to ELPA? In case it matters, people (not me) have been making Emms
available via MELPA for many years now. They simply ignore the
compilation step, and allow the user to either read the manual or ask
online to figure it out.

Which leads me to my technical question:

We (the Emms developers) are desperately looking for a better way to
give Emms access to taglib other than compiling glue code like we do
now. We really don't want to ship C, or C++, or Perl, or anything except
elisp with Emms. One option we are currently exploring is to ask the
user to install an existing package such as pytaglib (a GPLv3 python
wrapper around taglib). Is there any more elegant way to get access to
taglib through Emacs that anyone can suggest?

Thank you, and have a great weekend y'all.


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