Re: feature/package-vc has been merged

[Philip Kaludercic]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>
>> Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,  rms@gnu.org,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2022 17:31:22 +0000
>> 
>> Let's say I notice a something I would want to change/add/fix in a
>> package I am using.  find-function is just one way I would query Emacs
>> to open up the source, then make a few changes.  If I decide that these
>> are worth up-streaming, it is nice to just commit them right away and
>> call `package-vc-prepare-patch' to send the maintainer an email.
>
> How many package users do that?

I know of at least one for certain, and that is me.

But I have had discussions with other users from time to time where the
same thing comes up.  There has also been interest in alternative
package managers that are principally incompatible with package.el
(e.g. elpaca, straight) that advertise the fact that they allow users to
easily hack on packages.

> And if you think many do, why not clone the repository directly into
> ~/.emacs.d/elpa/?

Because that won't take care of scraping for autoloads, byte
compilation and installing missing dependencies.

>> All of this would only apply to packages with external `:lisp-dir's,
>> which doesn't immediately interest a user/developer.  Having to keep
>> this in mind would pointlessly expose an internal detail of package-vc
>> that I'd like to avoid.
>
> But it is us who introduced and support :lisp-dir.  If we think it's a
> leaky abstraction, we could decide not to support it.

You mean as in only allowing for packages to distribute lisp code in the
root directory of the repository?  That would pointlessly break too many
packages that decide to structure their file hierarchy for whatever
reason.