Re: GNU ELPA package discoverability

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ 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. ]]]

  > Yes, but more specifically, what are the goals of ELPA (and the proposed
  > ELPA without copyright assignment)? How are these to fit into the GNU Emacs
  > eco-system?

For us, the question is how they fit into the GNU Project and with its
goals of freedom.  However, most of the specific questions you brought
up are mostly practical.

You posed one question has an answer that comes from a nontechnical basis:

  > What about platforms - do packages need to support all
  > the same platforms that Emacs supports?

Each package, and each feature in each package, must support the GNU
system, and in particular GNU/Linux.  Support for any other systems,
including Windows and MacOS, is optional.

The rest of these questions you posed are purely practical.

  >  What should go into ELPA, what should go into Emacs 'core'? How
  > will these ELPA archives work with GNU Emacs releases? (e.g. Do the
  > packages in these archives need to be compliant with new release, such as
  > not using functions flagged obsolete, using updated versions of
  > libs/modules in emacs core etc). Will an Emacs release be held up if there
  > is a package in ELPA that does not work with new version? When can packages
  > be updated and what backwards compatibility with older versions of Emacs
  > should they support? ... for the archive where copyright is
  > assigned to the FSF, who is responsible for maintenance and updates? When
  > should packages be removed?

and the Emacs developers (talking with this list)
can work out good practical answers.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)