[emacs-pms] Introduction to the Emacsmirror

[Jonas Bernoulli]

Hello

I have just announced the Emacsmirror (https://github.com/emacsmirror)
on my blog. Below is a copy of the post for easier commenting.

While I do work on a package manager which will make use of the
Emacsmirror I hope that it is also useful without such a package
manager and that other tools that make use of it will be written. I
will describe epkg, my package manager, in a separate post.

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The Emacsmirror is a collection of almost 2900 Emacs packages. Each
package is available as a git repository.

If upstream uses git then the repository on the Emacsmirror is simply
a mirror of the upstream repository. If upstream uses another version
control system, then the repository on the Emacsmirror is created and
updated using the appropriate import tools. Packages hosted on the
Emacswiki or downloadable from the authors homepages have also been
imported and are continuously updated. Even some packages which are no
longer available elsewhere have been manually imported.

I have started this collection over a year ago and would like to
finally announce it so that not only the people who found it by
coincident can benefit.

Originally I hoped to have a package manager that makes use of the
Emacsmirror ready by the time I write this announcement, but
unfortunately just maintaining the mirror is more work than I
expected. But I hope that the Emacsmirror is useful to you even
without a package manager that makes use of it.

In addition to mirroring packages I also generate metadata about these
packages, which will be used by my package manager. If you would like
to write your own tools making use of this information you can find it
here.

You can contribute to the Emacsmirror by reporting new packages. If
you are an author of Emacs packages yourself please consider making
them available as git repositories and check whether you follow the
header conventions.