Re: Supporting multiline Package-Requires header

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Kaushal <kaushal.modi@gmail.com> writes:

> I think you meant to prefix the comment chars on each line of the
> multi-line header, correct?
>
> As for preference, I like (1)
>
>     ;; Package-Requires: ((pkg-a "4.2.0")
>     ;;                          (pkg-b "1.0") (pkg-c "2.0"))
>
> In (2), it is not clear where the requires end.


I dislike this format, though, because it is too easy to miss of the
last paren and then quite hard to detect (M-x check-parens doesn't check
these parens because they are in comments). This is already a problem
with the current format where there are several dependencies.

I raise possibility (3)

Package-Requires: ((pkg-a "4.2.0) (pkg-b "1.0))
                  ((pkg-c "1.2))

Although I would be concerned that some existing tools would silently
drop the second line. One advantage with (1) is that the first line is
invalid wrt to the existing format. There is something to be send for a
format change that should cleanly break existing tools: fail fast
behaviour seems a good thing. The first packages that go this way on
ELPA will fail on an older versions of Emacs than the first one to have
this support in package.el.

Phil