Status of jed-extra

[G. Milde]

On 28.09.05, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> Jörg, Guenter,
> 
> How is the work on jed-extra going?  I have not followed the development
> during these last months.  I guess I could go through all the commit
> messages and have the answer by myself, but I think it better to ask
> here.  

AFAIK, no work has been done on the jed-extra package over the summer.
There has been, however a lot of work to make the modes at Jedmodes.sf.net
SLang-2 compatible.

Today I upgraded to JED 99.17-111, so I expect to catch some more bugs in
the next days. After that I will make a new "release" of the Jedmodes CVS
repository.

> Could you please summarize the status of the package and the amount of
> work that has to be completed?  It would be great to have it uploaded
> soon, such that jed_0.9.17.111 could leave experimental and enter
> unstable. 

IMHO, jed-extra needs a major cleanup and rethinking. 


Scope of the jed-extra
----------------------

First of all we need to agree on the goal of the package. README.Debian
says:

  This is a package which will gather several add-on package for the JED
  editor. 

However, the level of support for these add-on modes is to be agreed:

  1. just provide the modes in a bunch (to save the user of downloading
     individually from Jedmodes.sf.net) Installation should be "by
     hand" (in /usr/local/...  or ~/.jed/lib/)

  2. Provide modes and a framework for installation (a jed library
     directory in /usr/share/jed/site-lib/, added to the search path
     in /etc/jed.d/20jed-extra.sl (using add_libdir() from libdir.sl)
     
  3. Install a choice of modes (inclusive adding autoloads and
     add_completion())
     
     a) choosen by the packagers
     b) choosen from a list with debconf
     
  4. Install all modes - whoever doesnot like that should not
     install jed-extra.   

My favourite is 3b, as this allows a good integration into Debian
and follows Guido Gonzatos "Goccia's Rules of Thumb":

   1. it should be as helpful as possible; but 
   2. it must not stand in the way; therefore, 
   3. it should be fully customisable, and 
   4. it should be usable by geeks and newbies alike.

Also, 3b allows administrators to change their setting easily with
dpkg-reconfigure.


Contained modes
---------------

Instead of just a download of Jedmodes-CVS, we should offer an
"intelligent" choice of packages: purge obsolete packages and add
interesting new ones (most obviously Paul's modes outsoured to separate
Jedmodes "releases").


Purge dpatches
--------------

Most bugfix dpatches are now fixed upstream.


Guenter



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