Re: Emacs Package Management

[Phil Hagelberg <phil@hagelb.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> For the FSF-hosted repository of packages, I'd want all the packages
> to be version controlled, so the "submit-package" would be nothing else
> than "bzr commit" (but yes, some extra code would need to be written to
> automatically build a tarball out of the newly committed code, ...).
>
>> Yes, this is something that package.el provides.  One thing that would
>> be nice is to have Emacs also advertise the packages it provides -- that
>
> Indeed, we'd of course want that, if/once we provide such
> a package system.  But that should be easy.

It seems like though there are a few questions remaining about policies
for submissions, there's a general consensus that Emacs should get a
packaging system, probably based on package.el with some enhancements
for submitting projects.

I'd like to start brainstorming as to what this would look like.

One way to do it would be to have every package register as a Savannah
project, and have some kind of operation (probably implemented as an
elisp function) that could produce the static files that package.el
consumes and place them in a publicly accessible http-served
directory. Making package releases correspond with VCS tags would
simplify things, so with some kind of post-commit hooks Savannah could
run this function whenever a tag is updated in the project.

This would require very few changes to package.el. Writing such a
function should not be difficult. The only question is how easy it would
be to get Savannah to run it at the right time.

Thoughts?

-Phil