> On Jan 23, 2019, at 6:00, Alexis <flexibe...@gmail.com > <mailto:flexibe...@gmail.com>> wrote: > > Having said all that, if the PicoLisp community generally felt it would be > best to settle on the mode currently bundled with the distribution as /the/ > Emacs mode for PicoLisp, and wanted me to remove my mode from MELPA - or at > least, rename it - in order to avoid confusion, i'd be fine with that as > well. :-)
Just to make sure that there is no confusion :) I am the one who raised the issue and I can't seriously be called "the picolisp community" ;) And the issue I raised is the following (repeating myself, just to make sure we are all on the same page): 1) On debian and related distributions, the picolisp official mode is installed by default and in fact, there is no mention of that mode in the emacs package manager when you look for it, so you have no idea that anything is installed until you load a picolisp file. It also could be that the paredit patch is applied, it could be that the picolisp-wiki mode is installed as well, but there is no visible trace of that. 2) Similarly, on Debian, the alternative picolisp mode from Alexis is not listed in the emacs package manager. It may be because of a namespace issue, I have no idea. 3) I don't know how all that works for other Linux distributions. It could be the same, it could be different. 4) On my Mac, from where I can only ssh to my Raspbian picolisp, I have access to the melpa picolisp package and I discovered that this was not the same as the one distributed with picolisp when I noticed differences in behavior that caused a bit of confusion (no access to docs, etc.) There are a number of ways to solve all that in order of "completeness" and "complexity": I) Document the situation in the picolisp distribution (that won't solve the fact that Alexis' mode is not visible in Debian's emacs, but at least people will know the issue), that's an easy and costless thing to do: edit the wiki and the Readme file. I could do that. II) make Alexis' mode visible in melpa even when running Debian. I'm in touch with the Debian packager for picolisp so I can ask if that's a namespace issue or something else. If that's only a namespace issue the solution would probably require to modify either the picolisp official emacs mode name or Alexis'. a- Considering that the distribution mode is not visible in emacs package system, changing its name would be transparent since calling the mode is made automatically with emacs hooks. Only when calling the mode manually would things differ, in which case the user should only remember the new mode name and we're done. Also, it's a one time install that is handled by Linux distribution packagers and users generally don't have to bother. b- Changing Alexis' mode name requires administrative work on Melpa's side, it requires users to manually change the mode, updates would not be automatic, etc. III) make sure that all the goodies that are in the picolisp mode are available in Alexis' mode and make Alexis' mode the distribution default. That includes inferior-picolisp.el. That requires Alexis to work on making sure that there is full compatibility. I checked the paredit patch provided with picolisp, it only adds a "paredit-delete-leading-whitespace" function in various places. It is probably useful, and why not propose it for inclusion in paredit proper ? If it is not accepted, there is probably a way to trigger that behavior without having to patch paredit (a hook in the picolisp mode ?) but I don't know. IV) Not strictly related, but the picolisp-wiki-mode could be transformed into a melpa package. That would be especially useful if "picolisp-wiki" (the server-side code) were packaged in Linux distributions so as to offer a useable wiki solution at large. That would also contribute to increasing picolisp's visibility. Jean-Christophe Helary ----------------------------------------------- http://mac4translators.blogspot.com <http://mac4translators.blogspot.com/> @brandelune
