Re: [Help-smalltalk] adding smalltalk-mode to ELPA?

[bill-auger]

the emacs mode is in the smalltalk source tree because it is distributed
and installed with the smalltalk software, so that all users of the
smalltalk software will have, it without the need for installing a
separate package or package manager - for that reason there is little
need to package it elsewhere - from what i understand, derek was
proposing that this would be useful for people who are reading
gnu-smalltalk code, but for some reason do not have smalltalk actually
installed - IMHO that use-case is minuscule at most; but anyone is
welcome to package it, of course if this is seen as useful - i
will contend once again, that there is nothing for the upstream
developers to do toward that end - to expect the upstream developers to
manage or even to assist with packaging, is a very unconventional
inversion of responsibility

generally speaking, the upstream software developers do not engage in
the packaging of their own software - even if they wanted to, there are
simply too many package managers to package for - if the software gets
packaged at all, that is usually done by someone else who is not
associated with the upstream dev team, but someone who is associated
with the repository for that particular package manager, or one of it's
users

whenever the package gets out of sync with the upstream, it is the
packager's responsibility to attend to that - i have never seen any
upstream be asked to maintain repo packages themselves, nor to
re-organize their source tree to provide an "intermediate option" that
makes packaging easier for the packager - the upstream publishes
tarballs - packaging is not their domain - maintaining repo packages is
entirely to responsibility of the packager, regardless of how simple or
difficult that particular software is to package - the human person who
maintains the repo package *is* precisely that "intermediate option" -
that is entirely what a repo package maintainer does - they fit the
upstream sources (whatever form they take) into a their particular
packaging format (whatever form that takes)

in this case, i think this is literally a single file - the humble
`curl` command is sufficient for pulling in the latest version - i will
also add that if you insist on mirroring the software in git, but for
some reason you only want to mirror a subset of the upstream tree, the
git filter-branch feature exists for that purpose - there is still
nothing that the upstream maintainers need to do in order to
accommodate that