Re: GNU ELPA package discoverability

[Sacha Chua]

Bastien <address@hidden> writes:

Hello, Bastien, all!

> I suggest the following patch, which moves "Manage Emacs Packages"
> from the [Options] menu to the [Tools] menu and add these subitems:
> - List packages
> - Customize package archives (<= the option you want to promote)
> - Customize the package interface

Oh, Tools makes sense too.

Hmm... What if the submenu has:

- Manage package sources     <-- move this one first?
- Choose packages          
- Customize the package interface
- ... Maybe that help link?

(I was going to suggest a second item that updates the package contents,
but I just realized that package-list-packages refreshes the list before
displaying, so that's something people don't actually have to worry
about. Here I've been refreshing it before listing, duh!)

Maybe in the customize help for package-archives, we can mention the
info node for "Finding extra packages" or directly list a few URLs so
that people don't have to go back and forth copying.

I'm sort of split on the wording of "Manage package sources". Package
archives is the name of the variable, so that's probably not going to
change, but an archive might also be conceptually equivalent to a single
package. "Package repositories" or "package sources" might be more
similar to the words used by other distributions. 

"Choose packages" is a little more action-oriented than "List packages",
but it moves away from what the command is called, so I'm not sure about
that either. Staying close to the existing names has lots of benefits,
after all.

Anyway, making package-archives a little closer to list-packages is
probably the main thing.

Sacha Chua