Re: feature/package-vc has been merged

[Philip Kaludercic]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> Please do not encourage people to load packages from MELPA.  MELPA
> does not cooperate with us.  Not in legal matters, not in ethical
> matters, and not in technical matters of development.

MELPA is not mentioned anywhere, and no special accommodations have been
made for MELPA (or other archive for that matter).  That being said, I
would like to see MELPA adding support for the package specification
format that this features has introduced.  I am doubtful this will
happen any time soon, because their "recipe language" and the ELPA
package specification language differ, so someone will have to figure
out how to translate the one onto the other.

All package-vc does support is installing a package directly from a URL.
This might even help people who "rely" on MELPA to drop the archive,
because it makes it easier to "manually" install those one or two
packages that haven't been added to {Non,}GNU ELPA yet.

> A given package that happens to be in MELPA may be perfectly fine in
> and of itself, or it may have problems of one kind of the other.
>
> If you come across a package in MELPA that has no particular problems,
> we can DTRT to put it in either GNU ELPA or NonGNU ELPA.

I have been doing that for over a year now.  All, but a negligible
amount, of packages on MELPA are legally/ethically fine.  The quality
differs a lot, but in principle it would be possible to add everything
to NonGNU ELPA.