Re: ELPA update

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> 1. Under what conditions will an ELPA package land up in core Emacs
>    distribution?

Good question.  I think it's largely the same conditions as including
any other package in Emacs.  The difference being that a GNU ELPA
package is more "ready for inclusion" (w.r.t things like copyright or
autoload cookies).

Admittedly, the existence of GNU ELPA makes it less important to include
a package directly in Emacs, since ELPA packages can be so
easily installed.  So I think that the main candidates for inclusion
will be packages that provide core infrastructure, such as libraries.

> 2. If a user raises a bug or a feature request against a package, how
>    and where should she report them.

I think it should be to the package maintainer, but currently, we don't
do anything special for it.

> 3. Allowing for the possibility that GNU ELPA packages or even popular
>    Emacs packages might get orphaned either by the author or the new
>    owner (in case of ownership transitions), will the Emacs project take
>    care of continued sustenance of the package.
> Please note that 3 is not a hypothetical question.

Most bundled Emacs packages are orphaned in some sense, so I definitely
don't take that as hypothetical.  I don't think we need a policy on
this, but the idea is that GNU ELPA packages will end up maintained
similarly to bundled packages: so if a maintainer drops the ball,
anybody else can pick it up.  And the general "Emacs maintenance team"
may install fixes at any time and provide minimal maintenance.
And we'll probably want to structure the set of packages into
categories, with one of the categories being maybe
"obsolete/old/unmaintained".

> ps: In another few days time, I will make yet another proposal to have
> my OpenDocument exporter included in ELPA.

Please do,


        Stefan