Re: [nongnu] main 385623dca6 2/2: * elpa-packages (notmuch): New package.

[Sean Whitton]

Hello,

Sorry I didn't catch the build failure before pushing.  I'll write a
separate message about that.

On Tue 20 Dec 2022 at 02:44PM -05, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> Sean Whitton [2022-12-18 16:36:56] wrote:
>>     * elpa-packages (notmuch): New package.
>
> FWIW, I think this is a mistake  because:
>
>> + (notmuch               :url "https://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch";
>
> This is not a repository containing the Emacs Notmuch package but
> a repository containing the Notmuch command line MUA tools, and within
> which they decided to also keep their Emacs front end.
> [ The ELisp code is about 7% of the total in there :-(  ]
>
> The (Non)GNU ELPA infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle such setups
> (for that reason we don't have an `erlang-mode` package).
>
>> +  :ignored-files
>> +  ("emacs/make-deps.el" "emacs/Makefile*" "emacs/*.tmpl" "emacs/rstdoc.*"
>> +   "emacs/notmuch-emacs-mua*" "bindings" "compat" "completion" "contrib"
>> +   "debian" "devel" "doc" "lib" "packaging" "parse-time-string" "COPYING"
>> +   "performance-test" "test" "util" "vim" "*.c" "*.h" "configure"
>> +   "INSTALL" "Makefile*" "README.rst" "notmuch-git.py" "version.txt"
>> +   ".travis.yml" "sh.config" "sphinx.config" ".mailmap" "COPYING-GPL-3")
>
> Reads hellish to me.  This is crap *we* have to maintain in response to
> whatever happens upstream.

I think that maintaining notmuch.el inside the rest of notmuch.git is a
reasonable choice by notmuch upstream; I do the same in two of my
projects where the non-Elisp heavily outweighs the Elisp.

Perhaps we could overcome this particular limitation in the scripts.
How about adding :files or :include, or similar, where if that's
present, then only files matching the globs listed are taken up, and
everything else is ignored?

For background: currently notmuch.el is published to MELPA and
apparently a lot of users like to install it that way.  But one
consequence is that users often end up with a newer version of
notmuch.el than the version of the command line tools, and this causes
spurious bug reports, etc..  So it would be good for upstream, and
users, to have a version on NonGNU ELPA which matched upstream's stable
releases.

(Additionally and less importantly, I would like to add mailscripts.el
to NonGNU ELPA, as you know, and mailscripts.el depends on notmuch.el.)

>> +  ;; Alternatively, could we have elpa-admin run 'make emacs/notmuch-pkg.el'
>> +  ;; before looking for a version?
>> +  :version-map ((nil "0.37" "0.37")))
>                                ^^^^^^
> This 3rd element should be a Git revision (IOW a commit id).

0.37 is a committish,[1] if not a commit; isn't that okay?

[1]  See gitglossary(7).

-- 
Sean Whitton