Re: Future role of ELPA

[Philipp Stephani]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> schrieb am So., 21. Feb. 2016 um 03:19 Uhr:

> 1. Not only emacs provides a package manager. Linux distributions also
>    provide some packages. Not sure if this is a good idea.
>    The same situation is e.g. for python. You can use pip to install
>    packages. And there are python packages provided by distributions.
>    Some people prefer OS packages, some prefer the native package manager.
>    Not sure what to do about this situation.

It's easy to make a .deb package which installs an Elisp package in the
way package.el would have installed it (but with global scope).

The two aren't 100% equivalent (upgrading/removing a dpkg-installed
package via package.el won't do the right thing), but the Debian
packages can easily do better than what is there now.

That would be great, but it would mean the Debian Emacs policy (https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/debian-emacs-policy) and the emacsen-common package, which provides the necessary infrastructure, would need to be upgraded.

My understanding is as follows: to build such a Debian package, you'd have to install the byte-compiled files in a directory with the same name as the Emacs package, and add its parent to package-directory-list in site-start.d, is that roughly correct?