Re: Integrating package.el

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:

Ted> Can you or Phil/Tom explain the metadata capabilities of elm.el and
Ted> package-maint.el respectively, please?  It would help to know what the
Ted> authors think and do a side-by-side comparison.

ELPA keeps a file, called archive-contents, that tracks metadata about
all the uploaded packages.  This metadata is extracted from the package
when I do an upload.

The information tracked are package name, the version, the requirements
list (see my other note), a docstring (for the package menu mode), and
whether a package is a single file or a .tar.  The latter is just so we
can construct the right URL at download time.

There's actually a second set of metadata about packages that are
included in Emacs itself.  This is (poorly) hand-maintained.  Ideally
this would be generated during the Emacs build.

I still haven't had time to look at Phil's changes, so I don't know what
he might have added or changed.

Tom