Re: Adding Flycheck to NonGNU ELPA

[Bozhidar Batsov]

There is a detailed comparison here https://www.flycheck.org/en/latest/user/flycheck-versus-flymake.html but many of the differences are probably not important to many people. You might remember that before Flycheck, Flymake was in a state of disarray and abandoment for years, so I'm pretty sure Flycheck making it almost obsolete back then was the trigger for some modernization around Emacs 26.1. And the contributors to Flycheck and Flymake were always pretty different - part of the reason Sebastien (the original author of Flycheck) quit Emacs were some attacks he was getting on emacs-devel.

Many people are so off-put by the discourse there, that they want to have as little as possible with it. And that's the real value of alternative packages IMO - they allow us to harvest the energy of all contributors.

Btw, flymake-flycheck was created only because Joao wouldn't agree to provide Flycheck support in Eglot (I know this from the author of flymake-flycheck). The whole situation with Elgot was a classic example of the hostility in Emacs towards packages some maintainers dislike... (https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/issues/42)

but considering that

more and more people rely on LSP for the information (and Eglot supports

Flymake OOTB), I don't know how valuable this is.

Btw, Eglot is not the only LSP client for Emacs. :-) lsp-mode users flycheck by default for its error diagnostics. I'm not a big LSP user, though, and often prefer the simplicity of just shelling out to whatever lint tools I need.

You probably know that Flycheck is one of the most download packages on MELPA, so it has plenty of happy users. I'm one of them and that's why I took over the maintenance of the project. I felt that NonGNU ELPA existed to make it easier for popular stuff to be installed by users, but it seems to me MELPA won't be going away any time soon.

On Mon, Feb 19, 2024, at 7:44 PM, Philip Kaludercic wrote:

"Bozhidar Batsov" <bozhidar@batsov.dev> writes:

> Hey everyone,

>

> Just wanted to ask if there's any interested in adding Flycheck

> (https://www.flycheck.org/en/latest/), a popular alternative to

> Flymake, to NonGNU ELPA?

>

> You can find the codebase here https://github.com/flycheck/flycheck

> There's also some integration with Eglot https://github.com/flycheck/flycheck-eglot

>

> I'm not sure what's the stance of adding alternatives to built-in

> packages in general, but I think providing some alternatives to the

> end users is not a bad thing overall.

My main question is what advantage Flycheck has over Flymake.  I

understand it has a database of tools built-in, but considering that

more and more people rely on LSP for the information (and Eglot supports

Flymake OOTB), I don't know how valuable this is.  In addition to that,

there are projects like

https://github.com/mohkale/flymake-collection

https://github.com/purcell/flymake-flycheck

that could help bridge the gap.