Re: emacs packaging: do we need to pull existing dependencies ?

[Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com>]

Am Sonntag, dem 05.02.2023 um 11:50 +0100 schrieb Cayetano Santos:
> 
> 
> > > Say for example emacs-org-roam@2.2.2: it requires emacs-org 9.4,
> > > which is not specified in the package definition, meaning we
> > > always pull the latest available. Do we have to, provided that
> > > emacs releases with org? Maybe there is already a clear rule
> > > about this topic, but to me this is not clear. We have package
> > > definitions with both criteria.
> 
> > I think it's important to think about this in terms of forward
> > compatibility.  Is org-roam guaranteed to always work with "the
> > current version of Emacs, whatever that may happen to be"?  In that
> > case, you could currently drop emacs-org.  If it requires bleeding
> > edge symbols on the other hand, or may freely decide that it will
> > need them, adding emacs-org to the inputs is a good idea.
> 
> I don’t see your point. This is exactly the responsibility of the
> package, declare its dependencies today, regardless of what the
> dependencies will be in the future. This is what the ’package-
> requires’ field is for, including the version number of the
> dependencies.
Still, there's typically a tendency of things going one way or the
other.

> If the dependencies of a given package are already there in emacs
> (say org-9.2), why do we need to pull org-latest ? If in the future
> this changes, an author decides he needs bleeding edge org features,
> and changes the version number of org in the ’package-requires’
> field, the new package definition will propagage-require org-latest.
> All in all, we may not predict future package needs, pulling
> dependencies just in case.
> 
> In any case, and whatever the decission, I think we should clearly
> state the way to proceed somewhere, as currently we have a mix of
> both.
Because people tend to be lazy.  If org-whatever used to require
bleeding edge org sometime in the past, we won't change it back to the
one shipped with emacs because 29.1 is out.  If it only ever used the
emacs stuff and is backwards-compatible with 25, we might not notice
that it even declares the dependency.

I gave you both a purist and a pragmatic solution, so you can choose
which to follow.  I won't press you one way or the other.

Cheers