Re: elpa.gnu.org packages requiring external packages

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA>]

>>     > ebdb-i18n-chn    # needs "pyim"

BTW, I think Emacs comes with 99% of what's needed already (it does
have a pinyin table and looking at pyim-hanzi2pinyin, there doesn't
seem to be much more to it), so maybe we could add to Emacs a function
equivalent to pyim-hanzi2pinyin and get rid of this dependency.

[ Of course, we should also try and get pyim.el into GNU ELPA, but those
  two are orthogonal.  ]

>>     > helm-ebdb        # needs "helm"

Clearly, getting Helm into GNU ELPA would be great.

Also, looking at the code I see 2 dependencies:
- the helm-ebdb function uses helm-other-buffer: so the helm-ebdb
  function is basically a specialized entry point into Helm, so it is
  useless without Helm.
- half the other functions call helm-marked-candidates.

So, if we could get rid of the second dependency, I'd argue that the
helm-ebdb package could be useful on its own (i.e. even without Helm),
for example it could be used with some (hypothetical) other
Helm-like framework.

IOW if we could get rid of the second dependency, then I think it would
make sense to remove `helm` as a dependency (and probably just merge
helm-ebdb into ebdb).  So my question here is: why do we need to call
helm-marked-candidates?

Is there some way to get Helm to pass us the list of candidates as an
argument (i.e. pass us what we compute via (or (helm-marked-candidates)
(list candidate)))?  If not, maybe we should make this a feature request
in Helm, to make the API between Helm and its backend functions such
that the backend functions don't need to call Helm function.


        Stefan