Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[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. ]]]
>
>   > I have been thinking implementing something like this, where package.el
>   > could handle a
>
>   >       ;; VC: https://source.com/package.git
>
>   > like header that would indicate where the source code for a package was
>   > being managed and could be downloaded and prepared (autoload, load-path
>   > overriding the default package, ...) when requested.
>
> Could you describe this functionality more concretely, so that people
> who don't thoroughly know this field can understand what it would do?

I am imagining a command like `package-fetch'.  You could give it a
package name or a repository URL, and it would clone the contents into
~/.emacs.d/elpa/devel.  Package.el would treat this as a special kind of
package (next to "installed", "dependency" and "built-in"), hopefully
being able to reuse the existing package-loading functionality.

To me this would demonstrate a real advantage for the practical software
freedom of Emacs users, by having access to both the history of a
package and making contributing to Emacs packages more immediate by
reducing the maintenance overhead.

-- 
        Philip Kaludercic