Re: unsupported packages area in the Emacs repo

[Phil Hagelberg <phil@hagelb.org>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:36:45 -0700 Tom Tromey <elpa@tromey.com> wrote: 
> Tom> Recently, Phil Hagelberg <technomancy@gmail.com> has been looking into
> Tom> integrating package.el into Emacs.  I don't know how much progress he
> Tom> has made.
>
> Can you and Phil give us your view?  How would you integrate ELPA
> (package.el) with Emacs, specifically using the DVCS features?  Your
> experience with ELPA so far is very valuable since you've gone through
> all the pain of setting up the packaging, dependencies, installer, and
> user support.

I haven't given DVCS integration much thought at this point, though I've
recently contacted Jonas Bernoulli who seems to have done some
experiments with it. The initial idea was to just add "Emacs package
source" capabilities to Savannah, but it seems like the Savannah hackers
are already extremely overworked, and nobody I've talked to is much
interested in hacking in PHP, which this would entail.

But after talking with Jonas I'm starting to think it might be better to
allow packages to be used from DVCS hosted anywhere and just maintain a
centrally curated list of repositories that contain packages. This
definitely needs more brainstorming and discussion.

Integration with Emacs mostly consists of deciding what parts of Emacs
should be treated as packages and marking them as such so they may be
upgraded separately.

Hopefully in the future this will also allow things like gnus and
org-mode not to have to be merged into Emacs' own VCS periodically, a
process which I understand is rather tedious. These packages should be
able to be installed straight from the upstream repositories.

> That's the technical side, but what about the supported/unsupported
> division?  Have you considered making package.el integrated into the
> Emacs core to work like the Cygwin installer, so unsupported or
> experimental packages can be installed and loaded easily?

I hope to get it working that way, yes.

-Phil