[Pkg-emacsen-addons] Bug#905081: Bug#905081: improve documentation for buster

[Nicholas D Steeves]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2018 at 03:43:13PM +0800, David Bremner wrote:
> Nicholas D Steeves <nsteeves at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> >
> > As why I feel "ok, this is a necessity now"?  Our recent changes to
> > emacs-goodies-el are disruptive.  Hopefully most users will be
> > satisfied, or will be apathetic, but I feel like dh-elpa documentation
> > should be improved for Buster's release, both for the benefit of
> > curious users and users who might think "argh, why?!"
> >
> > Source material thus far: tribal knowledge, an email or planetdebian
> > (I think) post Sean wrote a long time ago.  Various other bits from
> > conversations, bug reports, and emails.
> >
> > Let's codify it: Objective, Scope, Interactions, Pros, Cons,
> > Relationship to MELPA, Culture of cargo culting snippets, MELPA
> > culture, Emacswiki, Debian culture.
> >
> > Yeah, that's too much info, but I think that list is more or less
> > comprehensive.  Feel free to suggest anything that ought to be added,
> > cut, or published elsewhere.
> >
> 
> Is there some reason this can't go in a wiki page?

I guess it could, but dh-elpa's documentation is still in an
early-middle phase of project state and it this point lintian is
emitting a warning for packages that haven't yet been converted to use
dh-elpa, so we really ought to improve its documentation at least to
the point where it's a more mature late-middle phase of a project
state.  eg: 1) see lintian warning  2) install dh-elpa  3) read the
man page or README  4) Aha, that's why I should use it, this makes
sense.  5) maintainers convert their package to dh-elpa.

Bugs like goodies' #905578 (duplicate of something-335) either don't
occur, or can be solved with a binnmu with dh-elpa.  Not sure if that
would be "pros", or "objective", but it's worth saying something about
how it decouples a package from emacs flavour or suite in a more
robust way than the past approach.

As for why not a wiki page?  Having maintained a large moinmoin page
for a year or two I can unreservedly say that I'm not interested in
long-term maintenance of another page.  Especially without an emacs
mode to do edits...  I'm more motivated to maintain it in texinfo (in
git) than moinmoin, and I don't even like texinfo.

Cheers,
Nicholas
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