Re: Integrating package.el

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:06:15 -0700 Tom Tromey <address@hidden> wrote: 

>>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:
Ted> Can you or Phil/Tom explain the metadata capabilities of elm.el and
Ted> package-maint.el respectively, please?  It would help to know what the
Ted> authors think and do a side-by-side comparison.

Tom> ELPA keeps a file, called archive-contents, that tracks metadata about
Tom> all the uploaded packages.  This metadata is extracted from the package
Tom> when I do an upload.

Tom> The information tracked are package name, the version, the requirements
Tom> list (see my other note), a docstring (for the package menu mode), and
Tom> whether a package is a single file or a .tar.  The latter is just so we
Tom> can construct the right URL at download time.

Tom> There's actually a second set of metadata about packages that are
Tom> included in Emacs itself.  This is (poorly) hand-maintained.  Ideally
Tom> this would be generated during the Emacs build.

On Mon, 1 Mar 2010 22:09:59 +0100 Jonas Bernoulli <address@hidden> wrote: 

JB> $ cat elm.epkg
JB> (:summary    "Utilities for maintaining the Emacsmirror"
JB>  :created    "20081202"
JB>  :updated    "20100226"
JB>  :license    "GPL-3"
JB>  :authors    (("Jonas Bernoulli" . "address@hidden"))
JB>  :maintainer ("Jonas Bernoulli" . "address@hidden")
JB>  :provided   (elm elm-org)
JB>  :required   ((("elx" elx)
JB>                ("emacs" assoc cl finder)))
JB>  :keywords   ("libraries")
JB>  :homepage   "https://github.com/tarsius/elm";)
JB> $ cat ../package-commentaries/elm.txt
JB> This package is used to maintain the Emacsmirror which can be found at
JB> http://www.emacsmirror.org.

Thanks!

The Emacs package metadata will, ideally, be replaced with a package
repository that resides inside Emacs itself.  Thus users can explore and
activate Emacs packages without the usual drudgery, and some default
packages can even be activated for them.  This is my plan at least and I
hope it's accepted into Emacs.

Ted