On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 4:56 PM Göran Uddeborg goeran@uddeborg.se wrote:
That brought up a question: what should Emacs add-on packages do when it comes to native compilation? Should they build and bundle native code? If I understand it correctly, that would mean a new patch build of Emacs itself would also require a rebuild of all add-on packages. Or should we let Emacs recompile native files at run time? That would make the recompilation at Emacs upgrades automatic, but it would on the other hand put a copy of all used libraries in each user's home directory.
Good point - I feel it probably makes sense yes.
I checked the packaging guidelines (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/Emacs/) but it didn't mention anything around this as far as I could tell. (It still talks about xemacs which has been retired from the distribution, which tells me it hasn't been updated very recently.)
If there is consensus on native compilation of elisp packages, then the Emacs guidelines should indeed be updated. I guess then the packages would become arch'ed.
I feel the bigger problem is that many of the emacs lisp packages in Fedora are out of date. The general recommendation is to use Emacs' own packaging system(s) to install elisp, though I appreciate some people may prefer to use a distro package.
Jens