Re: GNU ELPA visibility

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 27.10.2012 9:18, Chong Yidong wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
>
>>> It would be good if every package would at least complement Version and
>>> Summary with a longer description, a link to its homepage (or emacswiki
>>> page if it has no homepage), and the date when it was updated the last
>>> time.
>>
>> You may find that, for single-file packages, even if they provide an
>> extended "Commentary" section, it will not show up in the
>> "list-packages" interface. At least when distributed over MELPA or
>> Marmalade.
>
> Please provide an example of what you mean.  I just checked with the GNU
> ELPA packages, and the commentaries show up fine with "?" in the
> *Packages* buffer.  Maybe MELPA or Marmalade are not providing the
> *-readme.txt files which are supposed to be there.

That is the problem with those two repositories, yes.

In principle, though, when there is no readme.txt, the package manager 
could fetch the source file and parse the description from it.
I understand that not doing that saves traffic, although I wonder how much.

>> I think it's fixed in Daniel Haxney's package.el fork, though.
>
> If there is a bug, it should be fixed orthogonally to all the rest of
> the refactoring he is trying to do.

I'm sorry for the confusion, his code is not doing anything different in 
that regard. I guess I skimmed it a while ago, saw the related part of 
`describe-package-1', got excited and failed to notice both the 
condition (if built-in) and the fact that that code is the same in the 
Emacs trunk.