Re: NonGNU ELPA

[Jean Louis]

* Clément Pit-Claudel <cpitclaudel@gmail.com> [2020-11-22 01:22]:
> On 11/21/20 4:18 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > I don't expect it will become significantly larger than the actual ELPA
> > archive itself:
> 
> I think the right metric would be the MELPA archive: I don't know how bit a 
> complete checkout is of all MELPA packages.

It is about 14 GB. If I change it slightly to --depth 1 it is about 10-11 GB.

Git is in my opinion not for releasing software, it is for
collaborative development. Releases of any software from git or other
version control systems should be packed and contain only what is
necessary for the user who receives such package. This is also because
authors or maintainers are deciding what is development version and
what is stable version. Git sources need not be stable and they do not
represent "release" and should not be regarded as release how MELPA is
accepting them.

The fact that many git repositories are online accessible does not
make them software releases. Author's opinion on what is release and
what is not shall be respected. But people did start going into
direction that git is automatically stable version which puts many
people and their data at stake.

Beside the git download size, when packages become packages after
building they are not so large, if I remember well just under 600 MB.

I am doing review of MELPA packages. There are many useless packages
and many unsafe and not polished and those repeating functions which
already exists. I would not include such.

There are those where author's name is not known as it is written only
as a nick. For me it would be legal problem as there is no truthful
authentic relation between the author who is not legally named "zack"
(example) and the receiver of software. Receiver would not know from
which entity or person did receive get the license, or both parties
would not have any option of defense or enforcement by the law.

> The main problem would be cases in which an emacs mode exists as
> part of a larger repo (like llvm-mode, which is part of lplvm — it
> was removed from MELPA because it took too long just to close the
> repo).

Isn't it not so that Emacs packages shall be either .el or .tar files?

Those packages that do not provide such releases and are useful can be
anyway packaged in non-GNU ELPA, why not? There is no need to
replicate git repositories, but rather actual packages regardless if
such are part of git repository or not.