bug#65027: 30.0.50; [PATCH] Document .elpaignore behavior in the Emacs Lisp manual

[Philip Kaludercic]

Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:

> On 8/3/2023 6:36 AM, Stefan Monnier via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the
> Swiss army knife of text editors wrote:
>>>>   From the discussion in bug#64985, Eli mentioned that .elpaignore wasn't
>>>> documented. (It turns out it's mentioned briefly in the GNU ELPA README,
>>>> but that's the only place I could find.)
>> That's because it was the only place where `.elpaignore` was
>> used/obeyed
>> (until the introduction of `package-vc`).
>
> Yeah, something more general that I've noticed is that as a package
> author, the documentation for how to make a package for GNU ELPA is
> split between the GNU ELPA README and the Emacs Lisp manual. I found
> this a bit confusing when I prepared my first package for submission
> to GNU ELPA, so (for example) I didn't learn about ".elpaignore" until
> after I sent my package submission to emacs-devel.
>
> Maybe it would make sense to put all the documentation in the Emacs
> Lisp manual, and then the GNU ELPA README can be the home for
> documentation about how to work with the GNU ELPA repository
> specifically (mainly as an administrator). What do you think?

When I find some time, I plan to write and add a package to ELPA that
could help automatise some of the necessary steps for contributing to
ELPA (explaining the difference between GNU and NonGNU, signing the CA,
testing for common mistakes, clean byte-compiling, etc.).  It would be
possible to also suggest creating a .elpaignore file as well.  Of
course, this does not mean there shouldn't be any guidelines written
down in the manual.