Please stop bundling third-party libraries

[tarsius]

mentor 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.

mentor bundles at least the following libraries:

• xml-rpc

Best regards, Jonas

[skangas]

Hi Jonas,

Thanks for pushing me to do this. I finally found the time to do this and have pushed the fix to the repository.

I did not merge your request since I had to make additional changes to make sure that xml-rpc version 1.6.8 still works, which is still the version on Marmalade.

Best regards, Stefan Kangas

[tarsius]

Thanks a lot for taking care of this issue.

Also I very much appreciate the appreciation!

Cheers, Jonas