Re: elpa.gnu.org packages requiring external packages

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> AFAICT the pinyin table is only kept in the quail table: quail tables
>> are somewhat similar to keymaps, so they work well to incrementally map
>> a sequence of ASCII chars to the possible chinese characters, but for
>> pyim-hanzi2pinyin we'll need to traverse this table to build a "reverse
>> table" (most likely represented as a char-table).
> Okay, I'll take a look.

Thanks.  I played a bit with quail tables in the past, so even though
I don't understand them 100% I should be able to help if needed.

> I suppose we can defer building it until first usage, etc.

Indeed.

>> I think it makes a lot of sense to fold helm-ebdb into the ebdb package,
>> without adding `helm` as a dependency.  This way, users of Helm and EBDB
>> won't have to additionally install helm-ebdb to enjoy the combination of
>> the two: just by installing `ebdb` and `helm` they'll get `helm-ebdb`.
> Oh I'm all in favor, but I assumed it would be a no-no from a
> dependency-graph point of view.

Not at all (actually, back when we got EBDB into elpa.git I mentioned
this possibility).

> If it doesn't matter, I can fold this back into ebdb and just use
> `declare-function' with "ext:" to quiet the compiler?

Yes.

> In which case, I might as well just do the same for
> `helm-marked-candidates' and leave it as-is?

Yes.

> I've also got these other silly little packages -- counsel-ebdb,
> company-ebdb -- etc, should those all be reabsorbed? There are an awful
> lot of counsel-* packages in there already.

I don't have an opinion on counsel-ebdb, but for company-ebdb an even
better option is to turn the company backend into
a completion-at-point-function (so it works not only for company users
but also for old-style TAB-completion users).

> Sorry, I'm just trying to figure out best policy for managing this kind
> of stuff.

And overall, I really wish someone could sit down, take the ivy,
company, helm, and completion-at-point-function APIs and design a new
API which can be used by all of those UIs so you don't have to implement
N different slight variations of the same thing.


        Stefan