Re: A proposal for a friendlier Emacs

[Alexander Adolf]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > Finally, a few thoughts on packages and curation. As of this writing,
>   > the combined list of ELPA, MELPA, and builtin packages of my current
>   > emacs lists 5,065 packages. Chances are, whatever topic you're looking
>   > at, there's more than one package. Which one is the best for my
>   > purposes?
>
> MELPA will not be included in whatever we set up.
> MELPA does not cooperate with us, so we don't support it.

No worries, I was only trying to make the point that there is a large
number of packages out there, and that there is a non-negligible chance
that there will be more than a single package for each use-case.

Let's evolve ELPA according to what we, the community agree upon, and
the other package archives may follow if they choose.

>   > Users can do "add to favourites" for a module. When one
>   > browses the modules, the number of users who faved it is shown. Not
>   > perfect, but a rule-of-thumb estimate for a module's popularity.
>
> A package repository web site could have a feature like this, but we
> want access to the packages to be read-only and anonymous in the usual
> case.  That is a matter of respecting privacy.
> [...]

Fully agree. Favourites can only be granted by registered users of a
package repository web site. But there's no reason the reading of the
favourites count of a package couldn't be read-only and anonymous. This
is exactly how CPAN works, btw.


Cheers,

  --alexander