Re: Adding Emms to ELPA (take 2), and a technical question

[Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net>]

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

>> The main issue back then was that Emms was a copyright mess. Stefan
>> Monnier helped me figuring out who to contact and I've fixed that since
>> (took a while). To the best of my knowledge, everyone who has code in
>> Emms has an assignment on file. Emms has an AUTHORS file which is kept
>> up-to-date. Everyone there should also appear in the FSF records.
>
> Great news, thank you!
>
>> Stefan also said that ELPA packages need to have their .el files at the
>> top-level.  However, Emms has its files in a lisp/ directory. This is
>> still the case, and I would like to keep it that way because Emms has a
>> lot of files and a lisp/ directory keeps things tidy. Is this still a
>> requirement for ELPA?
>
> Yes, and you even wrote it right: it's a property of ELPA (and not
> specific to GNU ELPA), so it affects MELPA just as well.  This comes
> from the fact that only top-level files are scanned for `;;;###autoload`
> cookies when the package is installed.
>
> You can work around this problem with extra work, tho: build your own
> autoloads file for the files in `lisp/*.el` and distribute it as if it
> were a "source" file.
>
> The Hyperbole package does that for its `kotl` subdirectory:
> they "manually" builds&updates a `kotl/kotl-autoloads.el` file (the rule
> to update it is in a Makefile), and then in `hyperbole.el` they have:
>
>     ;;;###autoload (load "kotl/kotl-autoloads" nil 'nowarn)

I'll look at hyperbole as a reference.

>> Emms also comes with a small piece of code that needs to be compiled in
>> order to use taglib (https://taglib.org/). The code is in a src/
>> directory in the Emms distribution. I understand that there is no way to
>> get ELPA to compile something as a part of the installation.
>
> Yes, there is.  You can put something like:
>
>     (eval-when-compile (call-process "make"))
>
> in your main file, for example.

We would need to make sure that there are compilation tools ready on the
machine first.

>> We can forgo any compilation at the ELPA installation stage as long as
>> people get to read the excellent Emms manual which explains how (and
>> why) to compile that bit of code.  Would any of this be a problem for
>> adding Emms to ELPA?
>
> These will require extra work on your part, but other than that, no,
> they don't impact your ability to add the package to GNU ELPA.
>
>> We (the Emms developers) are desperately looking for a better way to
>> give Emms access to taglib other than compiling glue code like we do
>> now. We really don't want to ship C, or C++, or Perl, or anything except
>> elisp with Emms. One option we are currently exploring is to ask the
>> user to install an existing package such as pytaglib (a GPLv3 python
>> wrapper around taglib). Is there any more elegant way to get access to
>> taglib through Emacs that anyone can suggest?
>
> I'm afraid I don't have a better solution to offer.

We'll keep on looking.

Thank you. I'll post again if we end up with emacs-devel-ish questions,
or when we are all done.

-- 
   "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"