Re: NonGNU ELPA and release frequency

[Antoine Kalmbach <ane@iki.fi>]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> I strongly agree that NonGNU ELPA is "necessary and requires attention",
> but I don't understand which discussions you are referring to above.
> Could you perhaps link some of these discussions, or give a brief
> summary?

Well, it gets mentioned here from time to time, most recently in the
Emacs survey thread.  Elsewhere, on Reddit[1] I observed meta-discussion
about this aforementioned survey thread on emacs-devel, also on
lobste.rs[2] in comments to a post about the survey itself.

I think a good summary is--correct me if I'm wrong!--that

   * People want to contribute packages to a package repository that is
     available in Emacs by default
   * People do not necessary want to go through the trouble of assigning
     copyright to the FSF to get their packages to GNU ELPA
   * People want the process of contributing packages to this repository
     to be lightweight (or at least more lightweight than of ELPA)

I think all of these are clear goals of NonGNU ELPA.  This much is
obvious from the NonGNU ELPA announcement email from August.

The important thing is, is that at least from what I've seen based on
these discussions, the goals of NonGNU ELPA really match the needs of
Emacs users, and the recent discussions regarding MELPA here and
elsewhere only corroborates this.  

What is striking is that people seem to acknowledge MELPA was never
nothing but a compromise to begin with. Once Emacs can offer an official
alternative that is both practical and yet respectful of user freedoms
the compromise is no longer necessary.  At least, that is only my
impression, your mileage may.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/je3eht/emacs_user_survey_2020_is_open/
[2] https://lobste.rs/s/7ynrre/state_emacs_survey

-- 
Antoine Kalmbach