Re: [External] : Re: NonGNU ELPA work

[Philip Kaludercic]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> I Cc'ed Drew to see if he is interested in cooperating.
>
> tl;dr More or less passively, sure.
> I'm not going to go to bat for it or overhaul it.
> Been there; tried that.

That shouldn't be necessary, from what I see, but I haven't experimented
a lot yet either.

> All of my code is GPL, and I've signed Emacs/FSF
> papers.  I've said many times that any of it can
> be used in any way by Emacs.

Ok, I wasn't sure because 1. the libraries aren't part of ELPA 2. as
they are developed on EmacsWiki, I wasn't sure if there were any other
significant contributors.

> I've proposed many of the individual features
> to Emacs dev.  The code is one thing; the ideas
> behind it are another - there are multiple ways
> to implement the latter (or similar).  I don't
> care to re-implement, myself, and I have no
> special desire to "own" any of it.
>
> The main (probably unconscious) uptake of the
> ideas has been from 3rd-party libraries such
> as Helm (aka Anything), Ivy, etc. implementing
> features that Icicles originally introduced
> (typically long ago).  Vanilla Emacs hasn't
> been much interested, IMO.

That is one of the reasons I am interested in seeing if they could be
added. I am part of a user-generation that's usually to lazy to install
new software manually, and instead limit myself to whatever is available
on various ELPAs. Not to defend this mentality, just mentioning it.

> I don't really understand what "NonGnu" means,
> though I've scanned emails that mention it.
> There's nothing non-GNU about my code, AFAIK.
> But what's in a name? ;-)

Nothing in particular, again I (falsely) assume there was a reason
against adding your packages to ELPA.

> My libraries that have a Version # of 0 do so
> because I didn't want to be bothered to update
> that field for no special reason, whenever any
> "version" (date) of the library could be used.
> I don't feel strongly about this; that's just
> the reason I did that.

I see. Date versioning works too, so this shouldn't be too much of an
issue.

> I don't use GIT to manage my code.  I just post
> updates to EmacsWiki.  Nearly all of my code
> used to be on MELPA, but they stopped pulling
> from Emacs Wiki (my pages on the wiki are
> locked to all but the wiki admins, FWIW).
>
> I've been clear that I have no problem with
> someone mirroring any of my code from the wiki
> to GIT repositories or whatever.  I think at
> least some of the libraries have been mirrored.
> ___
>
> I don't have a lot of time to devote to helping
> with any mirroring and such.  I intend to keep
> maintaining my code on EmacsWiki, when I make
> changes to it.

>From what I see, this is already being done by the emacsmirror project.

> As for overlap or redefinition of vanilla
> constructs: yes, that's no doubt a problem if
> someone expects to somehow integrate it with
> Emacs.  Loading some libraries redefines
> vanilla code.  Users of the code need to know
> that.
>
> Most often a redefinition is because either
> (1) I think my definition is better (a
> replacement) or (2) my definition provides
> compatibility with multiple Emacs versions.
> Or both at the same time.  For integration
> with Emacs, changes for #2 aren't needed.

I still hesitate, but as I haven't experimented with anything yet, I
don't want to give up because of this.

> Thank you for your suggestion.  I don't expect
> anything to come of it, frankly.  But anyone
> interested is welcome to reuse any bits of my
> code, or to look to it for ideas/inspiration
> when writing other code.

My suggestion would be to start out with a few popular libraries, such
as icicles, and see how that goes.

-- 
        Philip Kaludercic