Re: [bug-gettext] ELPA and gettext.el

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Alexandre Garreau wrote:
> Why isn’s gettext.el inside elpa?

You mean po-mode.el?

Many years ago, it was decided to distribute po-mode.el as part of GNU gettext,
not as part of GNU Emacs, because it should also run in XEmacs.

Nowadays, it appears that XEmacs has become insignificant:
  - see https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=emacs,xemacs
  - in major distros it has rendering problems in the menus
  - XEmacs appears to have only 1 active developer nowadays
    https://bitbucket.org/xemacs/xemacs/commits/all

Therefore I wouldn't mind if po-mode.el was moved outside gettext, if

  1) The responsibility of po-mode.el was transferred to the Emacs community
     at the same time. Yes, it would be welcome if someone could take care of
     the 5 open bugs regarding the PO mode. [1][2][3][4][5]

  2) The documentation is handled appropriately. Currently it is documented
     through some texinfo-formatted documentation [6]. Whereas ELPA packages,
     as far as I can see, currently only have plain text documentation, which
     is inferior to texinfo / hypertext formatted documentation.

> Would it be relevant and or reasonable to replicate it in ELPA?

Or maybe into emacs/lisp/ ?

I guess that when moving it to emacs/lisp/, the documentation could be
transferred easily into the Emacs documentation. On the other hand, users
would not have the "get the newest version easily" advantage, this way.

In any case, it should be a move (transfer), not a fork.

Bruno

[1] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?51547
[2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?55145
[3] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?55146
[4] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?55147
[5] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?55150
[6] https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Mode.html