[slime-devel] Packaging for ELPA

[Phil Hagelberg]

Recently on the emacs-devel mailing list there has been a discussion
about including a package manager in Emacs for the next release. This
should greatly ease the installation of elisp packages that are not
included in Emacs.

I have been using SLIME for Clojure work for a while now and am
maintaining the swank-clojure adapter for it. I'm planning to submit the
elisp portion to ELPA, which is the package manager that is slated for
inclusion to Emacs. This means I'll also need to submit SLIME, since
it's a dependency.

I've done the initial work to convert slime.el and slime-repl.el into
packages that can be used with ELPA. The changes have been pushed to my
github repository at http://github.com/technomancy/slime under the
"elpa" branch.

If I could get a cursory overview from one of the Slime developers it
would be great. This should make it easier for all users of Slime to get
it installed, especially once the package manager gets merged to Emacs.

If the changes are good, I can also push them back upstream. Right now
there is one change that is inappropriate for mainline Slime--I replaced
the body of slime-changelog-date to use the package manager version
instead of parsing the ChangeLog file from disk, but if you would like
me to push my changes upstream I can make it so it uses the ChangeLog if
it's present, falling back to the package manager otherwise. The other
changes are very minor; mostly just changing comment headers and adding
autoload directives.

Is this a good time for me to do this? I know Slime doesn't do formal
releases, but if there are some changes happening in the codebase right
now that would mean it would be better to wait, please let me know.

thanks,
Phil Hagelberg
http://technomancy.us