Re: Adding advisory notification for non-ELPA package.el downloads

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 7/8/17 8:03 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:

> They get into that situation because developers accept contributions
> without thinking of legal papers.  They get contributions from one
> person, then another, then another 50 people, then another 50.

It's not that serious. Most packages are created and maintained by a 
single developer, with only minor contributions from users.

There are big ones where that's not true, but they older, and they have 
surely considered going the ELPA route already.

> The way to avoid this is by showing people what the situation is like
> and how they can avoid it.  We need to educate the whole Emacs Lisp
> development community.

The nagging approach can just as likely alienate users. We already have 
a lot of those that scoff at the conditions of contributing to Emacs. 
Saying that the hassle is negligible (and saying that often, in users' 
faces) is unlikely to improve the situation.

It's better to work on streamlining the copyright assignment process and 
have a separate campaign (outside of our precious Emacs) to encourage 
developers to do it.

> That notice approach won't be effective, because people would only see
> the notice when they have a package ready to use.  That is too late.
> We want people to think of this when they START developing the
> package.

This distinction doesn't matter much. When someone starts developing a 
package, and until they publish it, they work alone in 99.9% cases.

> To inform Emacs users when they load a package from outside ELPA would
> be more effective, because they would see it earlier -- well before
> they think about putting it in a repository.
> 
> That approach would do the job, but it is not perfect.  It is not
> perfectly targeted.

I think it would be targeted perfectly: "Want to publish a package? 
Here's what you need to do to publish it where *every* Emacs user will 
be able to install it from!"

> Here's an idea that might be better targeted.
> 
> The idea is to display a notice when the user edits a file in Emacs
> Lisp mode (other than .emacs).  The code could avoid displaying the
> notice more than once per week -- using a timestamp for the last time
> it was displayed.

You might want to consider the idea that public relations is not your 
best skill.