Re: NonGNU ELPA work

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: philipk@posteo.net, stefankangas@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2022 02:01:37 -0500
> 
>   > I don't think you said you agreed explicitly, but all of the concerns
>   > you described were addressed, and you didn't respond to the last
>   > messages in that discussion.
> 
> That message from Sep 4 responded by my concerns by refusing to
> address them.

"Refusing to address" is a harsh and unfair characterization of what I
wrote there.

The message expressed surprise that there were significant additional
requirements for NonGNU ELPA where we don't have anything similar in
other cases when we accept code contributions.  And that is just the
summary: there were arguments and other issues raised in that exchange
which expanded on that.  If that's "refusal to address", then I don't
know what an agreement to address would look like.  Addressing your
concerns doesn't necessarily mean agreeing to everything you say.

> Why do we need special rules for NonGNU ELPA?  Because we are not
> applying the usual rules that we use to assure our legal needs and
> moral principles with everything else in Emacs.  For Emacs core and
> for GNU ELPA, we use copyright papers, and we notice and correct
> things that conflict with our principles.  But the point of NonGNU
> ELPA is to be an exception to those rules -- so we need another
> solution for it.

The only exception of NonGNU ELPA is the copyright papers, but I fail
to see how that affects the rest, i.e. noticing and correcting things
that conflict with our principles.  The copyright papers do nothing to
help in this regard.  We are required to do all that with any
contribution, whether to the core or to GNU ELPA.

>       https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/nongnu.git/tree/README.org
> 
> When the maintainers agreed to these rules a year ago, that was what
> convinced me that we could go ahead with NonGNU ELPA.  But we didn't
> set up a methodical system to carry them out.  We need that.

The agreement was under the assumption that we do all those jobs
anyway for any contribution, so no new system needs to be installed.
It turns out now you had something very different in mind.

What you request is a significant amount of additional clerical work
for reasons I at least don't yet understand completely.  And even if I
did understand them, there's still the non-trivial issue of finding
the volunteer(s) to do that job.