Re: Core ELPA was: Testing fontification, indentation, and buffer manipulation

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com> writes:

>>>>>> On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 17:42:31 +0200, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> said:
>
>     Eli> I will note that this is going where XEmacs was before, and I
>     Eli> don't think the result was encouraging, FWIW.
>
> Back when I still used XEmacs, downloading the 'sumo' tarball with all
> the packages was the second step Iʼd perform after downloading the
> sources, so in practice splitting them out didnʼt do much for me. OTOH
> I donʼt think XEmacs ever had anything like elpa.
>
> BTW, I may have missed part of the discussion, but why do we need two
> tar balls? Could we not just have a 'download a bunch of elpa
> packages' elisp function instead? [1] (Iʼll note that I essentially do
> this manually for things like org-mode which are in core and elpa).
>
> [1]  Iʼm spoiled: Iʼm rarely without an Internet connection


Hard to see this as "spoiled" these days. Covers a large part of the
user base. The only thing that I don't like about auto downloading is
that the Emacs you get would depend on the day your first ran it.  Of
course, two Emacs installed on different days would end up as the same
thing after M-x package-update.

Imagine someone starting Emacs-25 at the end of a debian or ubuntu
release cycle; would all the packages on ELPA still work? So, I think
this would involve updating the package.el protocol to support Emacs
version numbers would be a necessity for this.

Phil