Updates to Packaging Guidelines

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 22/05/06, Tom 'spot' Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-22 at 19:24 +0100, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> > Actually, perhaps I am overanalysing.:) I'll go away and try it, and
> > offer some suggested clarifications for the wiki.
>
> Indeed, it is entirely possible that my examples are not good examples.
> Please feel free to submit corrections or wording that will make the
> intent simpler.
>

May I suggest something like the following:

Packages of emacs add-on components (code that adds additional
functionality to emacs compatible editors) have their own naming
scheme. It is often the case that a component will add functionality
to several different compatible editors, or "flavours", such as GNU
Emacs and XEmacs (and possibly development versions of these editors).
The package name should take into account the upstream name of the
emacs component.

Where a component adds functionality to more than one emacs flavour,
the package name should be of the form emacs-common-$NAME. In this
case, the main package should contain only files common to all emacs
flavours, and the code specific to each flavour should be placed in a
subpackage reflecting the flavour $FLAVOUR-$NAME eg. xemacs-$NAME,
emacs-$NAME (the latter being the package specific to GNU Emacs). An
example of this scheme can be found in the package emacs-common-muse.

Where a component is designed to add functionality to only a single
flavour of emacs, the main package name should reflect this by being
called $FLAVOUR-$NAME. An example of this situation can be found in
the package emacs-auctex, which is built only for the GNU Emacs
flavour.

Jonathan.