Re: unsupported packages area in the Emacs repo

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:36:45 -0700 Tom Tromey <elpa@tromey.com> wrote: 

>>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
Ted> I hope Tom Tromey and Jonas Bernoulli are interested in participating
Ted> too, and that the Emacs maintainers are willing to give this a try.
Ted> FWIW I will help any way I can and I think it would really improve the
Ted> Emacs user experience to install unsupported packages easily.

Tom> I am interested but I don't have time to work on it.

Tom> Recently, Phil Hagelberg <technomancy@gmail.com> has been looking into
Tom> integrating package.el into Emacs.  I don't know how much progress he
Tom> has made.

Can you and Phil give us your view?  How would you integrate ELPA (package.el)
with Emacs, specifically using the DVCS features?  Your experience with
ELPA so far is very valuable since you've gone through all the pain of
setting up the packaging, dependencies, installer, and user support.

Tom> There are a couple problems to be solved in the Emacs source tree, and
Tom> then a more sane server side must be written.  The latter may just be
Tom> some version control system plus some post-commit hooks to regenerate
Tom> the metadata.

That's the technical side, but what about the supported/unsupported
division?  Have you considered making package.el integrated into the
Emacs core to work like the Cygwin installer, so unsupported or
experimental packages can be installed and loaded easily?  It may even
make sense to use package.el to manage supported packages, e.g. to set
up Gnus.  I wouldn't mind letting package.el manage my libraries, doing
it by hand is a waste of time 90% of the time.

There's a flexible assistant framework (analogous to the standard
"wizard" UI) in Gnus itself, originally intended for setting up Gnus.
Maybe it can be useful for package.el.

Ted