distributing piem via *ELPA

[Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>]

Leo writes:

> I must thank you for your patience with my sloppy elisp mistakes.  I
> feel like I've learned a lot from submitting these patches thanks to
> you.

Thanks for the kind words, and no worries about mistakes.  I appreciate
the interest and contributions.

> By the way, is there any reason why this package hasn't been submitted
> to elpa or melpa?  It's currently pretty difficult to find this package
> despite its usefulness which seems like a shame to me.

Yeah, that's a valid complaint.

I've come around to the view that in general software maintainers
shouldn't distribute their source code [1].  That feels natural to
someone like me that pulls in most of their packages from Guix (and
nearly everything else from Debian), but it's of course not the norm for
a lot of repositories, particularly language-specific ones.

So, while I don't plan to distribute piem myself, I'd be glad to see
others do so at some point.  Of course that depends on some critical
mass of users gaining interest even though, as you say, piem is pretty
difficult to discover.  I suppose there are other ways I could try to
increase its visibility (e.g., posting demos or info in places that get
more traffic), but that's not something I've done much of---just a few
mentions on Guix lists [2] and a pointer in public-inbox's
Documentation/clients.txt [3].

If you or someone else is interested in submitting piem to an *ELPA
repository, NonGNU ELPA [4] or MELPA would be the primary options, I
think.  ELPA proper is off the table because I don't want to require
copyright assignments from contributors.


[1] I think this post from Drew Default lays out the position well,
    though I can't say whether it's likely to be convincing to someone
    that doesn't already share a similar view:

    https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/09/Developers-shouldnt-distribute.html

[2] https://yhetil.org/guix/?q=nq%3Apiem

[3] https://80x24.org/public-inbox.git/commit/?id=c62ab5b7500bd9e7c584f5972e3c115842598957

[4] https://elpa.nongnu.org/