Re: Automatic Suggestion of Packages

[Mekeor Melire]

Thanks, Philip, for working on this feature.

As far as I can tell, your code is based on this workflow: Emacs
maintainers regularly locally build GNU Elpa as well as NonGNU
Elpa. They run the admin/scrape-elpa.el script which updates the
package-autosuggest.eld file that is part of the Emacs Git
repository. They review the changes and commit them.

This has some disadvantages: It is quiet some work for the core Emacs
maintainers: They need to judge if a package is a valid package for a
certain file. Only GNU and NonGNU Elpa packages are respected; other
package archives are not. Changes to the package-autosuggest.eld file
would not reach end-users until another Emacs release.

More generally, I have the impression that this is not the right place
to implement this feature. I think every package should be able to
suggest itself for certain file extensions (or even file beginnings or
endings like magic-mode-alist). I suggest to introduce a new package
header similar to these:

;; Covered-File-Extensions: ("\\.c$" "\\.h$")
;; Covered-Magic-Beginnings: ("^#!/bin/sh")

These headers would become part of the package structure and would be
distributed by package archives and would end on the end-users' local
device. In particular, if you have Melpa set up locally, you would be
able to find out which Melpa-packages cover .c extensions by filtering
your local package list accordingly.

This, of course, is much more work; but it seems to be the right thing
to do, to me. What do you think?