Re: elpa.gnu.org repository sync with Emacs

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:

> I also hope the distros move to using package.el for elisp activation.

The distros have perfectly good packaging solutions already, and they
have the QA in place to make sure that whatever you're downloading will
play nice with what you already have.

Which we don't really have, and it sounds from the discussion that the
Emacs maintainers think it would be too much work to have branches for
each Emacs, for instance.

So we'd basically have the same situation that Perl has with CTAN
vs. the packages that (say) Debian has.  You can say "apt-get install
libemail-mime-createhtml-perl" and get a version of that library that
you know will work on your machine, or you can root around on CTAN,
download the latest version there, and it'll probably work -- except for
the times it doesn't, because it relies on something that's slightly too
new for your machine.

Decoupled packaging over the long haul is hard.  Making sure that
separate packages work together over a decade is difficult.
Dependencies change and stuff break.

I want to be able to install Emacs in 2015 and just have it work without
getting into a morass of packages that I have to install from here and
there.  I want to say "apt-get install emacs", and possibly "apt-get
install slime" (if that's not in Emacs by then), and know that I have
something that has been tested to work on the machine I have then.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen