Re: Why are so many great packages not trying to get included in GNU Emacs?

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Another downside to adding one’s package to ELPA is the inconvenience.
>> On GitHub one can freely commit however he wants, receive PR and issues;
>> but if it’s in ELPA, you need to take care of commit message formats,
>> submit a patch and wait for someone to review & commit the patch.
>
> I thought that the advantage of ELPA was that the author could develop the
> package independently of the strict emacs commit rules and he only had to
> pay attention to the copyright assignment.

That's right.  There is a practical problem, OTOH, which is that
write/push access to a GNU ELPA package currently means write access to
all GNU ELPA packages as well as to Emacs's repository.

For this reason, while some GNU ELPA package maintainers can "just push"
as they see fit, as it should be, others haven't yet been granted this
right.  This is a problem which we should solve, indeed, for the benefit
of those less-lucky package maintainers, as well as for the benefit of
those Emacs maintainers who have to play the middle men, and more
generally for the benefit of the GNU ELPA archive and hence Emacs users
since the current situation tends to discourage submissions.

Note that giving write access widely, as we do now, has advantages as
well, in that it encourages package maintainers to participate in
development of Emacs more generally.


        Stefan