Emacs package guidelines introduce unnecessary deps

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 20 September 2012 14:51, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
>>>>>> "MC" == Michael Cronenworth <mike at cchtml.com> writes:
>
> MC> The guidelines now force any package that has Emacs add-ons to
> MC> install them in the main package and Requires:
> MC> emacs-filesystem. Emacs is not installed by default and I do not use
> MC> Emacs, nor will I ever.
>
> emacs-filesystem consists of three directories and nothing else.
> There's no dependency on emacs itself.
>

Exactly. And, also, before this current guideline was introduced,
those packages would have had a Requires on Emacs itself if they had
complied with the previous guidelines, or else split out the Emacs
file(s) into a sub-package.

> MC> I'm not sure why having sub-packages was such a negative thing. Can
> MC> we bring back sub-packages?

It was extra packaging work, and a lot of packagers were resistant to
splitting out sub-packages. Often splitting out the Emacs file into a
subpackage resulted in a package with just one or two files. The
emacs-filesystem approach is a pragmatic way of dealing with reality,
and consistent with eg. vim, XEmacs etc.

Jonathan (author of said guidelines).