Please stop bundling third-party libraries

[tarsius]

riviera is mirrored on the Emacsmirror, which is a large up-to-date collection of Emacs packages.

As the maintainer of the mirror I am trying to resolve feature conflicts that result from one package bundling libraries from another package. I suspect in most cases these libraries were included so that users would not have to find, download and install each dependency manually.

Unfortunately bundling also has negative side-effects: if the bundled libraries are also installed separately, then it is undefined which version actually gets loaded when the respective feature is required.

Initially that isn't a big problem but in many cases upstream changes are not included or only after a long delay. This can be very confusing for users who are not aware that some of the installed packages bundle libraries which are also installed separately. In other cases bugs are fixed in the bundled versions but the fixes are never submitted to upstream.

Also now that Emacs contains the package.el package manager there is a better way to not require users to manually deal with dependencies: add the package (and when that hasn't been done yet the dependencies) to the Melpa package repository. If make is required to install your make you might want to add it to the el-get (another popular package manager) package repository instead.

Alternatively if you want to keep bundling these libraries please move them to a directory only containing bundled libraries and add the file ".nosearch" to that directory. You can then load the library using something like this:

(or (require 'bundled nil t)
    (let ((load-path
           (cons (expand-file-name "fallback-libs"
                                   (or load-file-name buffer-file-name)
                                   load-path))))
      (require 'bundled)))

Of course if your version differs from the upstream version this might not be enough in which case you should make an effort to get your changes merged upstream.

reviera bundles at least the following libraries:

• dbgp

Best regards, Jonas

[JDHankle]

You must be mistaken. DBGP is not software that would be included outside this software.

[tarsius]

dbgp.el is also part of geben.

https://github.com/emacsmirror/geben/blob/master/dbgp.el upstream at http://geben-on-emacs.googlecode.com/svn

That repository appears to be maintained by Fujinaka Tohru and dbgp.el is according to it's library header also maintained by him. So dbgp.el appears to be used elsewhere and that elsewhere appears to be upstream. Tell me if I miss something. You might want to depend on geben or maybe not I don't have an easy answer.

[JDHankle]

This is a fork of geben

[tarsius]

Ah now I get it. Well in that case it is unlikely someone uses both packages that provide dbgp and things can be left as it is. Thanks for your time.