Re: [ELPA] Add Agitate package

[Sean Whitton]

Hello Prot,

On Tue 27 Sep 2022 at 09:01AM +03, Protesilaos Stavrou wrote:

> I want to install the attached patch on elpa.git.
>
> Agitate is a collection of commands or potentially useful functions
> that expand on the available version control features of Emacs.  Those
> are meant to complement a workflow that relies on the built-in Version
> Control framework and its accoutrements ('diff-mode.el',
> 'log-view.el', 'log-edit.el', 'vc-git.el', and potentially others).
>
> The reason I am posting this here is because I want to ask if it is okay
> to publish such a package, given that at least some of its code may be
> better suited for emacs.git directly.  I prefer the package format for
> the time being, because it gives me (and others) the chance to refine
> the code and decide on what is worth contributing to core Emacs.

I just looked through the file.  I recently read your prot-vc.el from
your personal Emacs configuration, and I believe that most (or all?) of
Agitate is a cleaned-up version of that?

I think that it is always worth taking a fresh look at one's personal
code and seeing if versions of parts of it might be upstreamable, so
thank you for your work.  One does have to accept, as I'm sure you
realise, that some things will be too idiosyncratic or personal to be
much use to others.  So it's reasonable to assume, given its origin,
that Agitate is a mixture of things that should eventually go into
emacs.git and things which should not.

In that case, it doesn't make too much sense to me to add it to ELPA,
but not for the reasons that you give.  It's not that code which is
targeting emacs.git cannot go on ELPA first, but it seems to me that
anything on ELPA should be a coherent, singular package.  And Agitate
isn't that -- it's a collection of functionality that you're filtering
things out of over time.

For myself, I'm looking forward to seeing some of this in core.

-- 
Sean Whitton