[Fedora-packaging] Update to Emacs packaging guidelines

Jonathan Underwood jonathan.underwood at gmail.com
Thu Dec 8 01:18:44 UTC 2011


Hi,

I've submitted a trac ticket for updated Emacs packaging guidelines.

Trac ticket: https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/124

Link to draft: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/Emacs-Dec2011

This draft addresses 2 functional points:

1/ In March of this year, the guidelines were updated to allow for the
use of the recently added emacs-filesystem and xemacs-filesystem
packages (sub-packages of Emacs and Xemacs respectively). The
intention here was to allow packages which contained support files for
(X)Emacs not to have to split off extra emacs-foo sub-packages.
However, unfortunately we neglected to mention exactly how the
Requires: emacs-filesystem should appear in packages - it needs to be
a versioned Require to ensure compatibility between byte compiled
elisp files and the version of the (X)Emacs installed. this is now
clearly outlined and exemplified.

2/ Previously, we required packages which were primarily add-ons for
(X)Emacs to split out the source elisp files into separate
sub-packages, so we'd have emacs-foo and emacs-foo-el. However, this
makes packaging more complicated, and in any case having the source
elisp installed alongside the byte compiled elisp aids in debugging
when an error occurs, and also for describing variables within Emacs'
help system (they are somewhat analogous to .py anbd .pyc files for
python). For this reason the updated guideline requires both source
and compiled elisp files to be together in a single package, greatly
simplifying the guidelines.

In addition I have gone to great lengths to remove a lot of
unnecessary duplication in the guidelines, hopefully adding clarity
along the way.

Comments welcome,
jonathan.


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