To All Package Maintainers & Would-be Maintainers.

SY> <rant> I understand your frustration, but that frustration is more XEmacs's fault than the external package maintainers', (1) There should be a mechanism at top level (I mean in Local.rules) to omit building a package which is in the tree. AFAICT, it is not possible to inhibit building of autoloads (at least) without munging lower-level Makefiles. (2) We need a safe way for maintainers who are making big changes to their packages to check them in gradually. This is especially true where xemacs-packages is the primary repository for the package source, or where the package maintainer may primarily work with GNU Emacs, not XEmacs. One possibility would be for each package's trunk to be the maintainer's preserve, and for you to maintain a release branch which is the Package Release Engineer's preserve. This would impose a substantial burden on you AFAICT, but it's a "natural" way to go. Alternatively, maintainers could be asked to make (temporary) unstable branches if they are going to be making a lot of changes and don't want to commit to your schedule. Or you could do that for them. If the packages need an unstable branch on a regular basis, as Martin suggested, we should consider whether maintaining a package hierarchy makes sense, or whether we should throw it all back into the users's laps as GNU does. (3) Dependencies are getting out of hand. Furthermore, problems with dependencies still seem to occasionally get hidden unless you do a make distclean. This is a long-term project, but we need to do something about better dependency handling. (4) There is no simple way to maintain just one's own package; you have to check out all the dependencies as well, and build them too. But this doesn't work very well if somebody screws up, since the build stops in the middle. So really, when you say "make sure it builds in the XEmacs packages tree," you're demanding that people check out 70MB or so of package hierarchy, keep it updated, and do full builds from `make [dist]clean' which involve a lot of time and a total of about 100MB. And *all* the build targets? Including ringing the changes on symlinks=t and build_without_mule? If that's what we need, that's what we need, but this is a lot of effort and resources on the part of an external package maintainer. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."