Hi, So, while filing a bunch of bugs against packages not complying with the Emacs add-on packaging guidelines, I started to think about the state of add-ons for Emacs [1]. Since those guidelines were put in place, Emacs has grown its own package manager (package.el, shipped with Emacs[2]), and now users can install something approaching 3000 packages from repositories like ELPA[3], MELPA[4] and Marmalade[5]. The Emacs package manager installs these add-on modules in the user's own directory by default, but it can also install them in a system wide directory. My thoughts are currently that: 1) Fedora doesn't have the manpower to package large numbers of packages from these repositories and keep the Fedora packages up-to-date 2) It may be possible to write automation tools like elpa2rpm, melpa2rpm, marmalade2rpm to automate packging for Fedora from those repositories, but such tools don't yet exist. Even if they did, the repositories usually aren't the canonical upstream for the packages. 3) Even if we could generate rpm packages directly from the emacs package repos, package.el doesn't have any notion such as "installed but inactive" for packages, such that installing rpm packages of emacs packages would activate them for all system users, which is undesireable. So, I am not really sure what a good way forward is at this point. Certainly package.el could be extended to help us out in some ways, such as having a notion of "installed and available but not active". But is it worth the effort? The whole issue is another case of competition between an application package managers (package.el) and system package management such as we have had to solve for perl, python, texlive etc etc. But it's not clear to me what a good solution would be for Emacs. I'd welcome any thoughts anyone has (especially Tom Tromey if he still reads this list). Cheers, Jonathan. [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Emacs [2] http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_package_system.html [3] https://elpa.gnu.org/ [4] http://melpa.org/#/ [5] https://marmalade-repo.org/ -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
