Hi Jonathan,
On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 03:27:01PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Git commit 0944224a8d46 (git{,-blame}.el: remove old bitrotting Emacs
> code, 2018-03-13, [1]) removes two elisp modules from Git that are
> redundant next to modules available in other packages. Good! Now as
> packager I would like to make the transition as smooth for users as I
> can.
>
> Git's emacs support is in a package named git-el ('fast, scalable,
> distributed revision control system (emacs support)'). It provides
> emacsen-common scripts to compile the elisp and a site-start script to
> load it.
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. What should I put in maintainer scripts to be sure that the
> compiled elisp gets properly removed on upgrade? Are there
> existing packages I can imitate for this? Should I declare a
> Breaks by git against the old git-el package and rely on its
> existing scripts?
>
> 2. Aside from updating the README.emacs in the Git package, is there
> anything I can do to make the transition more smooth for users?
>
> 3. Any other words of advice?
>
> Thanks,
> Jonathan
>
> [1] https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git/+/0944224a8d4668c98e4eca0cbe67c4d0d88aa932%5E%21/
>
I'm not an authority on maintscripts, but when I elpafied muse-el the
previous maintainer's emacsen-remove functioned as expected and purged
the old byte-compiled files--I didn't have to do anything special.
https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-emacsen/pkg/muse-el.git/tree/debian/emacsen-remove?h=debian/3.20%2bdfsg-0.1&id=6d120d606cecf98e700a776dc28f638e628b6f25
As for making the transition more smooth, I've read that magit is a
"killer app" that motivates people to switch to emacs ;-) I'm not sure
if it is appropriate to make the new git-el a dummy transitional
package that depends on elpa-magit, but--speaking for myself--if I
wasn't already a magit user I would consider the following scenario a
happy surprise:
* dist-upgrade from stretch to buster
* receive a NEWS item from git-el
- says something like: git-el is dead, long live magit ;-)
- NEWS also points to docs for getting up to speed with magit as
quickly and as easily as possible. I'm not sure that most users
would read README.emacs as part of a dist-upgrade. Set this to
display for all versions of git-el since 1:2.11.0-3+deb9u2
- P.S. I've side-lined an old project wrt providing quickstarts and
printable emacs cheatsheets. Please pester me about this if you
think it would benefit this hypothetical git-el -> magit
- marvel at the productivity boosts from magit
That said, if elpa-magit becomes Debian's official replacement for
git-el then elpa-magit would need Breaks and Replaces git-el (<<
version-with-dummy-transitional-package)
Additionally, because there is a stretch-backport of git I would have
to provide a bpo of src:magit (multiple bin:packages) to satisfy the
new dependency.
Debian-emacsen Team: Comments on this approach?
Cheers,
Nicholas
P.S. Please pester Aron Xu to update the stretch-backport of git,
because it's several versions out of date.
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