Proposed new requirements for emacsen add-on packages

[Agustin Martin]

2014/1/20 Rob Browning <rlb at defaultvalue.org>:
>
> Recently I've been fixing some non-trivial problems I introduced in
> emacsen-common 2.0.0 -- and to finish fixing them it looks like it may
> be best to change (and augment) some of the add-on package requirements.
>
> Originally, I'd really tried to make it so that as of emacsen-common
> 2.*, add-on packages didn't have to depend on *anything*, but that's
> proving difficult to unworkable, so I'm leaning toward adding a
> requirement that add-on packages depend on "emacsen-common >= 2.0.8".
>
> If it helps, emacsen-common is only about 140k installed.
>
> Thoughts?  Strong objections?

Already replied to debian-emacsen, but since many emacsen add-on
maintainers may not be subscribed I am also replying here

Did not test in depth, but I think the add-on state files state files
could be recreated from /usr/lib/emacsen-common/packages/install in
case emacsen-common is installed for the first time (i.e., not
upgraded). Since emacs flavours depend on emacsen-common they should
byte compile things when configured.

If this works, I'd prefer this to be sorted out from emacsen-common
package instead of making all these many add-on packages change.

Note that this may not fix something like

# dpkg --purge --force-all emacsen-common
# apt-get install emacsen-common

if the emacs flavour is already installed. But adding the dependency
seems to also not fix it.

If something like this does not work adding the dependency is the
lesser evil as long as emacsen-common NEVER tries to pull emacsen nor
anything that should not be present in a very minimal system. But I
still prefer a fix into emacsen-common itself if possible.

Other interesting things were proposed in this thread like having
support for things like

 elfiles=foo.el bar.el autoload.el
 . /usr/lib/emacsen-common/emacs-install-standard.sh

but while highly desirable this is something different from the
original problem this thread is about.

> (And for whatever it's worth, I've been posting some relevant bits to
>  debian-emacsen at lists.debian.org lately, but I imagined that many/most
>  of you aren't subscribed.)

Maintainers of add-on packages, please really consider subscribing  to
this list if not already subscribed. It is a low traffic mailing list
and is where this discussion should really take place.

Regards,