Re: [NonGNU ELPA] New package: sweep

[Eshel Yaron]

Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

>> I would like to submit a new package to NonGNU ELPA, called "sweep":
>
> May I ask what the name is supposed to mean?

Of course, but there's not a lot of depth to it, basically its derived
from "SWI-P(rolog)", with the "I" replaced with two "e"s for
"Emacs-Embedded".  So a possible backronym may be
"SW(I) Emacs-Embedded Prolog".

> This sound very interesting!

Thank you!

> From briefly skimming through the code I see that you define a new major
> that doesn't inherit from the default `prolog-mode'.  Is there a reason
> not to do so, or even implement sweep as a minor mode?

I am not opposed to building on top of `prolog-mode`, but since
`sweep-mode` has access to the actual SWI-Prolog runtime including
notably its parser, we can (and do) provide better implementations for
many of the features of `prolog-mode`, at the cost of targeting only
SWI-Prolog where `prolog-mode` is more implementation agnostic.

For example, `sweep-mode` defines an `indent-line-function` which takes
into account the dynamic operator definitions that may occur in Prolog
code.

So currently I'm not sure what will be the benefits of inheriting
from `prolog-mode`, but I'll gladly revisit it as missing features in
`sweep-mode` pop up.  Does that make sense?

>> The dynamic module ("sweep-module") is distributed and built as part of
>> the latest SWI-Prolog version, so the only files that need to be
>> distributed via the ELPA package are the Elisp package sweep.el and the
>> user manual.
>
> What happens if someone doesn't have a recent version of SWI Prolog?

Currently you would get an error while loading `sweep.el` because
`sweep--ensure-module` is executed on load which tries to find and load
the dynamic module.  This is probably not ideal.  I wonder if it would
be preferable to suggest fetching and building the dynamic module, or
just to fail more gracefully...

> Also, I am guessing this is the reason you want to add it to NonGNU ELPA
> instead of GNU ELPA, right?

Yes, as I would currently prefer not to require SWI-Prolog contributors
to assign copyrights in order to contribute to this project.

>> sweep is licensed under the BSD-2 license, similarly to the rest of
>> SWI-Prolog.  Its source code is available at
>> https://git.sr.ht/~eshel/sweep and at
>> https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/packages-sweep.
>
> I see you've added Sourcehut as the "official" URL in the package
> header, do you plan to use your mailing list
> (https://lists.sr.ht/~eshel/dev) too?  If so, I recommend adding the
> mailing list as the "maintainer" email address so that people can easily
> send you a "public" message.

Thanks, I'll do that!


Eshel