Namespace for (X)Emacs packages?

[Jonathan Underwood]

Hi,

An issues has arisenduring review of the Muse package for (X)Emacs:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=181404

The FE packaging guidelines state:
"If a new package is considered an "addon" package that enhances or adds a new
functionality to an existing Fedora Core or Fedora Extras package without being
useful on its own, its name should reflect this fact."

However, it's frequently the case that an elisp package builds for
both Emacs and Xemacs (and potentially any other flavours and unstable
versions) making it ambiguous what the package name should be.
(emacs-foo, xemacs-foo ??). To make matters worse, packages imported
to FE from Core have used various schemes, often appending (x)emacs,
rather than pre-pending.

One suggestion is, for a tarball foo.tar.gz, to call the package foo
(i.e. foo.spec, foo-version.src.rpm) but have it build these binary
packages:

foo-version.rpm: containing files common to all emacs (eg. docs), and
required by the packages below
emacs-foo-version.rpm: specific byte compiled package for Emacs
emacs-foo-el-version.rpm: elisp elisp source files for Emacs
xemacs-foo-version.rpm: specific byte compiled package for XEmacs
xemacs-foo-el-version.rpm: source elisp files installed for XEmacs

This has the disadvantage that the module name is then foo in
bugzilla, and not emacs-foo or xemacs-foo, which may confuse users.

Other proposals include calling the package emacs-foo, but that then
might confuse xemacs users, or may result in having emacs-foo-xemacs,
which sleems slightly absurd.

Thoughts? (Perhaps worth reading the bugzilla before sharing them, tho).

Jonathan