Re: Does Elpa welcome themes? Or should those stay in Melpa?

[Artur Malabarba]

> Hi all,
Hi

> New to the mailing list and Savannah/GNU - hoping this is the right
> place to ask this (I incorrectly asked Savannah-users last night -
> hoping for better luck today).
>
> If there is a more specific Elpa related list, please let me know and/or
> disregard this.
I believe this is the right place.
Just allow me to be slightly pedantic here and say "Elpa" is a generic
name for package archives. You're actually referring to GNU Elpa
(which I'll just call Gelpa below, 'cause that's cute). I'm not really
correcting you, it's just something to be aware as other people in
this list might use that distinction.

> I notice that there aren't any other themes in Elpa (or if so, I'm
> missing them).
>
> Is this primarily due to reluctance in assigning copyright to FSF by
> theme maintainers or a preference by Elpa to keep them out of the base 
> Elpa/Emacs?
I'm not aware of any such preference, but Stefan can probably be of
more help here.

> On a related note, if I want to continue hosting the code at the current URL 
> and
> also clone it into the Elpa repository, would it be better to do it as
> an "external" type or a "subtree" type?
I use a subtree for Names, and it's suiting me well. I can show you
the exact commands I use (not at my linux box right now), but the
basic procedure is the following:
1. Create the package's directory
2. Add your repo as a remote
3. Do a subtree merge to put the package in its directory, and repeat
it whenever you want to update the Gelpa version.

This is the nicest approach I found. Every commit form your remote
will be mirrored on Gelpa's git repo, and there will be a single extra
merge commit whenever you do the merge.
The only slight disadvantage is that your very first merge will pull
every commit since you started the repo, so you'll kind of flood
Gelpa's commit list when you first add the package (if your repo was
relatively old).

The other option is to do development straight on Gelpa. There's
little reason to push the package to other elpas if it's on Gelpa,
which reduces the need for a Github repo. It's what I do on
`let-alist', but it's certainly not suited for all packages.