Re: Preferred approach to inclusion of data in ELPA package

[sbaugh@catern.com]

Hugo Thunnissen <devel@hugot.nl> writes:
> Hi all,
>
> For my package phpinspect.el I am now looking into the creation of an
> index of PHP's built in functions and classes. I'm considering
> different ways of distributing this dataset, but I'm not entirely sure
> what would be the preferred way. Finding out the signatures/properties
> of built in functions and classes is straightforward: I can generate
> valid PHP stubs for them which can then be parsed an indexed by my
> package just like any other PHP code.

Isn't this data dependent on the version of PHP that the user is using
phpinspect.el with?  So distributing a single canonical "set of stubs"
would be inaccurate.

Is it possible to automatically generate even the set of stubs on the
user's computer, by running PHP?  Doing that operation on the user's
computer, and caching the output so that subsequent loads are fast,
seems like the best option to me.  Then you completely avoid this
problem of distributing data, and you also get behavior which reflects
the version of PHP the user is working with.