Re: Adding Flycheck to NonGNU ELPA

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 21/02/2024 23:19, Stefan Kangas wrote:

> Another thing is that we could use a good built-in macro to define
> flymake backends.
>
> Perhaps Steve Purcell (added to CC) could be convinced to contribute his
> excellent flymake-flycheck[2] and flymake-easy[3] packages to core?
> This would kill two (or more) birds with one stone, and also remove some
> of the gripes that some users have with flymake.

There doesn't seem much point in having flymake-flycheck in the core 
when flycheck is still required to use most of its backends (they're 
part of the package). It also depends on flycheck at runtime anyway.

flymake-easy has another problem: IIUC it hasn't been updated for 10 
years, and as such only uses the obsolete Flymake protocol (one we keep 
in flymake-proc.el for compatibility). It also employs defadvice.

Back to flymake-flycheck, I wonder if it would be a better idea to have 
it as part of the flycheck package itself (fewer things to install and 
enable separately). But then it's not obvious at which point the 
checkers should be made available to flymake. If that happens when 
flycheck-mode is enabled, that would be too late: at that point the user 
has seemingly indicated that they want to use flycheck as UI as well.

> [2]  https://github.com/purcell/flymake-flycheck
>
> [3]  https://github.com/purcell/flymake-easy