imakado/emacs-symfony — pull request #2 by tarsius (2012-09-01 15:03:54+00:00)
Title: stop bundling libraries

The Emacsmirror [1] is a large collection of Emacs packages. Upstream
changes are integrated regularly. As the maintainer of the mirror I
try to fix small (and occasionally big) problems as I find them in the
mirrored packages by writing mails such as this to the maintainers of
the affected packages.

I am currently trying to resolve feature conflicts between mirrored
packages that result from one package bundling libraries from another
package.

In many cases these libraries were probably included so that users
would not have to find, download and install each dependency manually.

Unfortunately bundling also has some negative side-effects: if the
bundled libraries are also installed separately, then it is unclear
which version actually gets loaded when the respective feature is
required. Initially that isn't a big problem but unfortunately in may
cases upstream changes are not included or only after a long delay.
This can be very confusing for users who are not aware that some of
the installed packages bundle libraries which are also installed
separately. In other cases bugs are fixed in the bundled versions but
the fixes are never submitted to upstream.

Also now that Emacs (as of 24.1) contains the package.el package
manager there is a better way to not require users to manually deal
with dependencies: add the package (and when necessary the
dependencies) to one of the package repositories [2]. If make is
required to install your make you might want to add it to el-get's
(another popular package manager) [3] package repository instead.

[1] http://emacsmirror.org https://emacsmirror.github.com
[2] http://marmalade-repo.org/about http://melpa.milkbox.net
[3] https://github.com/dimitri/el-get

Thanks a lot,
Jonas