Re: ELPA policy

[Stephen Leake]

Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:

> Here's a naive question regarding where you place Lisp code
> that is distributed with Emacs (part of the tarball): Will
> anything change for users, depending on where you happen to
> manage the code wrt ELPA etc.?
>
> I'm guessing (and hoping) not, so that the distributed
> directory structure will remain the same.  Is that correct?

That's a good point. But I'm not clear what previous state you are
comparing to.

There are two cases;

1) A package that is currently in Emacs git moves to Gnu ELPA git but
   remains in the Emacs tarball.

2) A package that is currently in Gnu ELPA git stays there, and is added
   to the Emacs tarball.

I would argue that tarball ELPA packages should be installed in some
system level elpa directory (similar to the user's .emacs.d/elpa), not
in the main emacs/lisp install directory.

I don't think the history of a package should determine where it is
installed. So in case 1), I expect the package to be in a different
installation directory from the previous Emacs release. But it's still
in the default load-path, so this change is transparent to the user.

But it's not too important; the important distinction is that tarball
ELPA packages are _not_ in the developer Emacs workspace, so core
code cannot accidently depend on them.

-- 
-- Stephe