WEBVTT
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Hello! My name is Philip,
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and I'll be giving a brief update on
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NonGNU ELPA.
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Before we begin,
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let's first make sure
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everyone's on the same page.
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What is NonGNU ELPA?
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Put simply, NonGNU ELPA
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is a new Emacs Lisp package archive.
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similar to its sister archive, GNU ELPA.
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The main difference is that
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GNU ELPA regards each package in the archive
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to be part of Emacs itself.
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This means each significant contributor
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has to have signed their copyrights
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to the Free Software Foundation.
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NonGNU ELPA is made for packages
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that cannot ensure this condition.
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The immediate consequence of all of this
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is that more packages can be installed
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out of the box.
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All you need to install,
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for example, magit, evil-mode, slime,
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is a simple M-x package-install.
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The more subtle consequence
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is that ELPA distributes
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stable packages by default.
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This differs from, for example,
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the community-maintained package archive MELPA,
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where each change in the respective package repository
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triggers a new package to be rebuilt.
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Of course, "stable" here has to be taken
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with a grain of salt because,
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on the one hand,
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a package maintainer can be very careful
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to avoid buggy code in their default branch,
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and on the other hand,
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a package maintainer can be too eager
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to tag a new release
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without properly checking
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that the code works as intended.
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My personal hope is that
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more people using NonGNU ELPA
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be incentive for increase
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for package development to shift away
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from the currently predominant
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rolling release model,
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improving the overall stability
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of Emacs configurations.
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Another side effect of the initiative
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is a chance to clean up
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the Emacs package space.
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Over the last few years,
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a lot of packages have been abandoned,
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have been broken, duplicated,
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or even in some cases,
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replaced by functionality in Emacs itself.
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When reviewing packages for NonGNU ELPA,
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the opportunity to avoid these problems
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will hopefully also improve the general quality
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of Emacs packages.
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So, what is this update about?
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I'm taking Richard Stallman's announcement
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at EmacsConf 2020
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as my reference point.
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There, the idea, the history,
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and the motivation was explained,
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and the call for contributions was made.
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I won't be going into these aspects
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again this year.
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As this implies, there was nothing concrete
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at that point.
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The first practical steps towards NonGNU ELPA
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were taken up by Stefan Monnier.
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This included updating GNU ELPA's build system
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to support the requirements
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of NonGNU ELPA as well.
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And so eventually,
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the idea became a Git repository,
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nongnu.git on savannah,
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then a website,
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elpa.nongnu.org,
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and then around late December of last year,
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NonGNU ELPA was also added
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to the package-archives list.
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Sadly, progress stalled from this point on,
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with the new archive consisting of only
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five or six packages.
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It took until August
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for more packages to be added,
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some by their respective authors,
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such as Magit and Projectile,
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but most by contributors such as myself.
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As of recording,
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the archive has around 70 packages,
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with more pending to be out soon.
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These include popular applications
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such as the previously-mentioned Magit,
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SLIME, or wgrep,
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major modes like php-mode, rust-mode,
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go-mode, clojure-mode, lua-mode,
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markdown-mode... You get my point.
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And a number of visual themes,
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among other things.
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If you are interested in using NonGNU ELPA,
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but you are still bound
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to an older version of Emacs,
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all you have to do is
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to add the snippet
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from the NonGNU ELPA home page
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updating the package-archives variable.
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For Emacs 28 and newer,
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one might have to watch out
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that you're not setting package-archives directly,
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and if you are doing so,
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to update the value.
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Emacs 28 only updates the default value
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and will not manipulate the user's configuration.
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Finally, a short note
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for package developers.
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Most packages up until now
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haven't been added by their maintainers.
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For the most part,
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I have been collecting and reviewing the packages
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which have been added,
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which takes time
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and is one of the main reasons
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why we're still at only 70 packages.
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This is of course not a permanent solution.
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The intention here is
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to bootstrap, so to say,
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the interest in NonGNU ELPA
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by making it more interesting to you
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and thus more interesting to contribute to.
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If you are interested in adding a package
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that already exists, or a new package
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to NonGNU ELPA, all you need to do is
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send an e-mail to the
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Emacs development mailing list,
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emacs-devel@gnu.org.
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This is an open mailing list
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and requires no special registration.
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Your message should
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mention NonGNU ELPA in the subject
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and contain a link to a public Git repository
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in the body. Ideally, a brief explanation
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on what your package does
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would be much appreciated.
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The proposal will be reviewed
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by the readers of the mailing list,
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and after a bit of back-and-forth
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on possible issues and improvements,
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the package will hopefully be added
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to NonGNU ELPA itself.
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The simplest mistake a lot of packages make
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is to either not have
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or maintain a version attribute
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in the package header.
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This is done despite actually being necessary
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for a well-formed Emacs package
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according to the Elisp manual.
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ELPA relies on this tag
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to detect new package versions
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that will be built and distributed.
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If the version isn't updated,
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no new package will be released,
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and any changes won't be made public.
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So, that's that on NonGNU ELPA.
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To summarize, NonGNU ELPA is an
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Emacs Lisp Package Archive for Emacs,
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without a need for copyright assignments.
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It works, it exists, and it's been used already.
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I'm looking forward to
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more packages being added to the archive
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and improving the overall experience
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of Emacs out of the box.
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Thank you for your interest, and goodbye.
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[captioned by sachac]
