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. ]]]
>
>   > You can clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git, checkout
>   > the elpa-admin branch and in the file elpa-admin.el line 1332 you find:
>
>   >           (elpaa--get-section
>   >            "News" (elpaa--spec-get pkg-spec :news
>   >                                    '("NEWS" "NEWS.rst" "NEWS.md" 
> "NEWS.org"))
>
>   > This first tries to find a "News" section (like "Commentary"), and in
>   > failing to do so checks for the files "NEWS"", NEWS.rst", "NEWS.md" and
>   > "NEWS.org" in that order.
>
> Thanks, but I'm not sure of what that means.
>
> I don't know what the Lisp program does, because it calls functions I
> don't know about.

The concrete functions are not too necessary, this is just a snippet
from a larger function.  Clone the repository if you are interested in
the defaults.

> I am not sure what the English text means, because it depends on context
> that I don't know.  WHERE does it search for a "News" section -- within what?
> Within certain files, perhaps?  If so, which files?

See (elisp) Library Headers, where it says:

           We use additional stylized comments to subdivide the contents of the
        library file.  These should be separated from anything else by blank
        lines.

One such header that ELPA checks is "News", in whatever ELPA considers
the main file of a project to be.  It might look something like this:

        ;;; News:

        ;; In version 4.2.1 we added the function `foo' and the user
        ;; option `foo-bar`.

> Then it searches for certain file names.  Again, within what?
> Does it search within one specific package?

In case the section was not found, it searches for files in the package
root.

-- 
        Philip Kaludercic