Re: rainbow-mode

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Chong Yidong wrote:

> as Stefan says, all things being equal, it is preferable to put new
> non-infrastructure packages into elpa.gnu.org.

This is a pretty big change in policy, IMO. Who's going to maintain
these things? Where do the bug reports go? If it were in Emacs proper,
I could and would (maybe) be fixing any bugs in it, improving docs,
etc. If it's in elpa.gnu.org, I'm unlikely to ever even look at the
code. And if I did and wanted to change something, all I have is a
tarfile (no?), the repository lives somewhere else, and I'm unlikely
to bother seeking it out, submitting a patch, etc.

I tried the elpa interface and it seems very nifty, but I do share the
concerns expressed about what it all means in practice for the
maintenance of the associated packages. As an "easy way to get a
package that would otherwise not be in Emacs" (eg AUCTeX), it seems
really nice; for farming out things that otherwise _would_ be in
Emacs proper, not so much.

Some of these issues would go away if these "non-infrastructure"
packages (not AUCTeX etc, but rather the things that would have been
added to Emacs before elpa) were hosted in a central Savannah bzr
repository (or possible as a subdirectory in the existing Emacs
repository that is excluded from the tarfiles; I'm not sure if the
number of files in the Bzr version of Emacs matters very much), so
that the Emacs developers can and do feel able to help maintain them.
From my point of, the ideal thing would be something like a separate
top-level "elpa/" directory in the normal repo, not compiled by
default, that I could compile with `make elpa' or somesuch.

Then putting something on elpa doesn't mean relegating it to being a
second-class citizen.