On Mon, 25 May 2020 at 14:36, Richard Stallman <
rms@gnu.org> wrote:
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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
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> Yes, but more specifically, what are the goals of ELPA (and the proposed
> ELPA without copyright assignment)? How are these to fit into the GNU Emacs
> eco-system?
For us, the question is how they fit into the GNU Project and with its
goals of freedom. However, most of the specific questions you brought
up are mostly practical.
You posed one question has an answer that comes from a nontechnical basis:
> What about platforms - do packages need to support all
> the same platforms that Emacs supports?
Each package, and each feature in each package, must support the GNU
system, and in particular GNU/Linux. Support for any other systems,
including Windows and MacOS, is optional.
That seems clear and makes sense.
The rest of these questions you posed are purely practical.
> What should go into ELPA, what should go into Emacs 'core'? How
> will these ELPA archives work with GNU Emacs releases? (e.g. Do the
> packages in these archives need to be compliant with new release, such as
> not using functions flagged obsolete, using updated versions of
> libs/modules in emacs core etc). Will an Emacs release be held up if there
> is a package in ELPA that does not work with new version? When can packages
> be updated and what backwards compatibility with older versions of Emacs
> should they support? ... for the archive where copyright is
> assigned to the FSF, who is responsible for maintenance and updates? When
> should packages be removed?
and the Emacs developers (talking with this list)
can work out good practical answers.
I think getting some initial answers/position on some of these could help. For the type of packages we would like under a GNU managed archive, we need to make that processes as easy and straight-forward as possible for both the developers and those who perform critical maintenance processes.
I'm willing to try and assist here if possible. As a starting point, would it be worthwhile starting some discussion threads in emacs-devel for each question. I could then try and collate the responses into a single document which could be a starting point. For example, I would probably start with the question "What criteria should we use to determine if a module, library, feature etc go into GNU Emacs core, or GNU ELPA?
What do others think? I could also have a thread asking for questions which should be answered or things which should be documented with respect to ELPA.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)