Re: Adding Emms to ELPA (take 2), and a technical question

[Arthur Miller]

Joost Kremers <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, May 01 2020, Richard Stallman wrote:
>> [[[ 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. ]]]
>>
>> Lots of packages require building and that uses tools.
>> Emacs, for instance, needs various tools to build it,
>> including a C compiler.  Nothing wrong or unusual there.
>>
>> What alarms me about pdf-tools is that it tries to install those tools
>> itself rather than leaving the user in control of that step.
>
> Mind you, pdf-tools does ask the user for permission first and it pops up a
> buffer where you can follow what is happening.
>
> Honestly, as a user of pdf-tools, I'm glad this happen automatically if I 
> choose
> to. Saves me from opening a shell and copy&pasting a bunch of commands.

How would you do it? Get Emacs to install and compile pdf tools from the
source, or just to call the package manager from the distribution/OS of
choice, which I sure are as many as users here.

I am defenetly more happy installing applications through package
manager from my distribution then through Emacs. Mostly because of
updates and dependencies with other applications. Will Emacs also track
when those tools are updated, bugs fixed etc?

Unless you would to turn Emacs into OS package manager a lá pacman, rpm,
etc, which I wouldn't mind by the way, but I don't think Emacs is there.

Also pdf-tools are used by other applications in system so it is
easy to get them in any distro, inclusive proprietary OS:s(Win,
Mac). Why shoujld pdf-tools be different then any other tool we use in
Emacs (binutils, compilers, debuggers, grep, ag, you-name-it)?