the emacs mode is in the smalltalk source tree because it is distributed and installed with the smalltalk software, so that all users of the smalltalk software will have, it without the need for installing a separate package or package manager - for that reason there is little need to package it elsewhere - from what i understand, derek was proposing that this would be useful for people who are reading gnu-smalltalk code, but for some reason do not have smalltalk actually installed - IMHO that use-case is minuscule at most; but anyone is welcome to package it, of course if this is seen as useful - i will contend once again, that there is nothing for the upstream developers to do toward that end - to expect the upstream developers to manage or even to assist with packaging, is a very unconventional inversion of responsibility
generally speaking, the upstream software developers do not engage in the packaging of their own software - even if they wanted to, there are simply too many package managers to package for - if the software gets packaged at all, that is usually done by someone else who is not associated with the upstream dev team, but someone who is associated with the repository for that particular package manager, or one of it's users whenever the package gets out of sync with the upstream, it is the packager's responsibility to attend to that - i have never seen any upstream be asked to maintain repo packages themselves, nor to re-organize their source tree to provide an "intermediate option" that makes packaging easier for the packager - the upstream publishes tarballs - packaging is not their domain - maintaining repo packages is entirely to responsibility of the packager, regardless of how simple or difficult that particular software is to package - the human person who maintains the repo package *is* precisely that "intermediate option" - that is entirely what a repo package maintainer does - they fit the upstream sources (whatever form they take) into a their particular packaging format (whatever form that takes) in this case, i think this is literally a single file - the humble `curl` command is sufficient for pulling in the latest version - i will also add that if you insist on mirroring the software in git, but for some reason you only want to mirror a subset of the upstream tree, the git filter-branch feature exists for that purpose - there is still nothing that the upstream maintainers need to do in order to accommodate that _______________________________________________ help-smalltalk mailing list help-smalltalk@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-smalltalk
