Re: feature/package-vc has been merged

["Björn Bidar" <bjorn.bidar@thaodan.de>]

Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

> Björn Bidar <bjorn.bidar@thaodan.de> writes:
>
>> 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. ]]]
>>>
>>> Please do not encourage people to load packages from MELPA.  MELPA
>>> does not cooperate with us.  Not in legal matters, not in ethical
>>> matters, and not in technical matters of development.
>>
>> What justifies this kind of gaslighting against Melpa? 
>
> Wikipedia defines gaslighting as:
>
>     Gaslighting is a colloquialism, loosely defined as manipulating
>     someone so as to make them question their own reality [...]
>
> so I am not sure how this applies to this thread.

I'm sorry but English isn't my mother tongue.. From my pov he wrote
misleading statements about Melpa which did sound like gaslighting to me.

>>                                                        You might not
>> like to hear it but without Melpa Emacs wouldn't be were it is now..
>
> This is a counterfactual discussion, because it cannot be said if MELPA
> was a necessary or contingent fact.  I agree that MELPA provided an
> important service in collecting the number of packages that it did, but
> if NonGNU ELPA had been created over 10 years ago with the regular GNU
> ELPA, perhaps it would have been enough?

Some have issues with the FSF, RMS etc. staying out of the whole thing
was convenient for some.
Even if you ignore that Melpa was more convinient to use unless there's
a more modern way to interact to with ELPA.

> That being said, if I had a single-use time machine I wouldn't waste it
> on finding out insignificant something like this.
>

Nothing to argue about that.

>>> A given package that happens to be in MELPA may be perfectly fine in
>>> and of itself, or it may have problems of one kind of the other.
>>>
>>> If you come across a package in MELPA that has no particular problems,
>>> we can DTRT to put it in either GNU ELPA or NonGNU ELPA.
>>
>> It's perfectly fine that is on Melpa, not everyone likes the mailing
>> list based approach of Gnu.
>> Offer other options such as a Gitlab or Gitea instance instead of
>> antiquated Savanah (or make it more modern in other ways)
>> and people might move elsewhere.
>
> I am afraid you have some misunderstandings regarding GNU ELPA (and I
> suppose NonGNU ELPA as well).  GNU ELPA packages can and often are
> developed on PR-based forges, where the state is synchronised into
> elpa.git/nongnu.git, where the packages are build and distributed.
> There is no need to use mailing lists -- except maybe to announce a
> package and to request it be added to an archive.  But am I understating
> your correctly that that is really the point you are objecting to?

I'm sorry I wasn't aware of that, I assumed that using Github to develop
the package is enough to disqualify it.

I am objecting against the assumption Melpa equals bad. I can understand
the issue with some of it's packages or even the place of distribution
but it hard to replace a platform like Github for the network effect it
has.

Br,

Björn