After lengthy discussions with Santiago (who I thank for being persistent and patient), among other things, we've decided that we should consider allowing add-on packages to Depend on emacsen-common. Current policy doesn't allow this, but I can't recally any particularly strong reason (please remind me if there is one). Currently all add-on packages are required to depend on emacsen, not emacsen-common.
This change would provide an advantage for packages for which emacsen support is just a minor additional and optional item, packages like dpkg-dev (before dpkg-dev-el) and gettext, for example. They could just add a dependency on emacsen-common rather than having to create a separate package like gettext-el just to avoid pulling in an entire version of emacs, and the emacsen-common dependency would still make sure that emacsen-common was actually initialized and installed before the add-on packages tried to use it. Thoughts? -- Rob Browning rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org Previously @cs.utexas.edu GPG=1C58 8B2C FB5E 3F64 EA5C 64AE 78FE E5FE F0CB A0AD
