Re: ELPA policy

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 11/05/2015 04:41 AM, John Wiegley wrote:

> An exception to this rule is when a certain service (say, streams) should
> always be available, without requiring further installation of libraries.
> Emacs acts as a sort of "standard library" for Emacs Lisp, so the same kinds
> of things we'd like to have in such a meta-library, should be in core.

Why not consider ELPA a part of the "standard library", too?

As long as all code that uses streams.el is not in Emacs core, I don't 
see any harm in requiring the user to install streams from ELPA (which 
would probably happen automatically, via a declared dependency).

When the core starts using it, sure, we can move it there.

> I do think that applications using such libraries should almost always go in
> ELPA, except for those that have been grandfathered in, like Emacs Calc. There
> are some things you should always be able to reach for, no matter whose
> machine you are on, or if the Internet is currently available.

Yes, some pieces of functionality that we consider a part of the 
standard set (Calc is not that, for me, but apparently it's popular 
enough). The criteria for applications to include them might be that 
Emacs has dedicated menu items, or uses the application's commands in 
some global bindings (that's why xref, for example, can't be moved to ELPA).