Re: NonGNU ELPA work

[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. ]]]

    > - Maintainers change.  We only make the agreement with the current
    >   maintainers.
    ...

When I read that list of weaknesses, I concluded that some of them are
valid -- they would have some effect.  You are right that asking the
package developers for explicit assent will not be perfectly
effective.

"It's not perfectly effective" does not imply "Let's cast our fate to
the wind."  So I'm not persuded by the leap to the idea that we should
not even ask.  It is clear that getting the current developers' assent
to keeping the package aligned with the NonGNU ELPA rules will make
problems less frequent, and that's important.

You described that assent as a "written agreement".  What I have in
mind is an email discussion.  It's not entirely wrong to call that "a
written agreement", but that term is likely to lead some people to
think of something different.

The point is to ask the developers to agree in email to develop the
package in accord with the NonGNU ELPA rules, so we can set up the
NonGNU ELPA repo to update directly from their own repo.

People in the free software community generally do carry out
commitments they have made, and that should make this simple measure
pretty effective.  Even though not 100%.

For these reasons, your arguments didn't convince me to change this
decision.


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