Emacs packaging guidelines (was: Re: Fedora minimal installations)

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 29 July 2015 at 18:42, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 18:53:27 +0200, Harald Hoyer wrote:
>
>> "The Emacs add-on packaging guidelines no longer stipulate that packages which
>> also bundle support for Emacs should split out those Emacs files into separate
>> sub-packages. This package should instead ship those files with the main
>> package which should also Require emacs-filesystem. See
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Emacs for more detail."
>
> And once again the wording is weak. It says "should". Three times even.
>

What's wrong with the word "should"? What am I missing? Seems like the
usual use of this word to me?

> Based on that, calling existing emacs- subpackages "violations" is a
> highly questionable thing to do.

the only place the word "violation" appears is in an alias I gave to a
tracking bug I set up to track emacs packages which haven't update to
the new guidelines.  It doesn't appear in the bug report.

> And new packagers would prefer more
> clear and concise wording, too.

It'd be great if you could suggest a clearer wording - the current
guidelines resulted from an effort to clarify the old ones, but I'm
sure there's room for improvement. I'd happily read over a draft if
you prepared one for the FPC, I definitely agree the current ones are
a bit cumbersome.

Cheers,
Jonathan.