Re: Why are so many great packages not trying to get included in GNU Emacs?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

ndame <address@hidden> writes:

>>
>> For this reason, while some GNU ELPA package maintainers can "just push"
>> as they see fit, as it should be, others haven't yet been granted this
>> right. This is a problem which we should solve,
>
> A simple solution which occurs to me that a script which has the necessary
> permissions could pull the changes to its local repo and push from there
> to ELPA. (This implies that the author pushes his changes to a public
> place like GitHub, so the script can pull them from there.)
>
> The script pulls the changes from the external repo when a certain dedicated
> file in the repo (e.g. ELPA.pull) changes. The author changes this file
> when he wants to authorize a new pull (wants to do a release to ELPA).
>
> The script can discover the changed trigger file either by regularly checking
> the external repos of the ELPA packages which follow this protocol, or if it's
> too much work then the author can send a mail to a dedicated mail address
> which triggers the pull of his repo (e.g. sends a mail to address@hidden
> with the subject <package name>.

I think it could be even simpler than that: ELPA is built every 24 hours
right now. If we just registered external repos with ELPA, part of the
build process could be pulling from those repos automatically, once per
day. Package authors already have a mechanism for manually triggering a
release: incrementing the package version number. There's no harm in
ELPA bringing in new commits from the externals, if the author is still
in control of when a new version is released.

Eric