emacs-goodies-el restructuring

[Peter S Galbraith <p.galbraith@globetrotter.net>]

[I sent this earlier but never saw it appear...]
Hi,

I've seeking comments about the structure of the emacs-goodies-el source
package, which currently produces the following packages:

 emacs-goodies-el       Miscellaneous add-ons for Emacs
 emacs-goodies-extra-el Miscellaneous add-ons for Emacs -- extra dependencies
 devscripts-el          Emacs wrappers for the commands in devscripts
 debbugs-el             Access the Debian BTS from within Emacs
 dpkg-dev-el            Emacs-related Debian development helpers
 gnus-bonus-el          Miscellaneous add-ons for Gnus

I want to restructure these packages.  I intend to leave `devscripts-el'
and `gnus-bonus-el' alone, giving control over devscripts-el' to its
upstream author Junichi Uekawa and find someone who uses gnus to take
care of `gnus-bonus-el'.

That leaves 4 packages.  Here's what I'm thinking:

- `emacs-goodies-extra-el' currently holds elisp packages that depend on
  other Debian packages.  It only contains:

   dict.el: wrapper around the 'dict' command.

  and depends on `dict'.  I will be adding `newsticker' soon, which
  depends on `wget'.

  I'd like to merge these files into `emacs-goodies-el' and move the
  `Depends' to `Recommends'.  That would kill off one small package that is
  often overlooked by users.

- Ben Pfaff said he's willing to kill off his debview package and let me
  merge deb-view.el into emacs-goodies-el, which also contains:
    
   apt-sources.el: major mode for editing Debian sources.list files;
   apt-utils.el: interface to APT (Debian package management);

  In a similar Debian theme, the package `debbugs-el' contains:

   debian-bug.el, an Emacs command to submit a bug report.
   gnus-BTS.el, an enhancement to Gnus to provide buttons on bug
     numbers seen in Debian-related messages.

  Perhaps I should kill the `debbugs-el' package and create a `debian-el'
  package for Debian user tools to hold the five files?

  There's also dpkg-dev-el, which I thought of keeping separate because it
  holds files of interest mostly to Debian developers:

   debian-bts-control.el: builds control@bugs.debian.org email messages;
   debian-changelog-mode.el: a helper mode for Debian changelogs;
   debian-control-mode.el: a helper mode for debian/control files;
   debian-copyright.el: major mode for Debian package copyright files.
   readme-debian.el: major mode for editing README.Debian files.

  It could be argued that `debian-changelog-mode.el' is also useful for
  Debian users because it highlights bugs and lets users click on them.
  But perhaps there should be a diminished user mode without the editing
  commands?

  Should I keep `dpkg-dev-el' and `debbugs-el'|`debian-el' as separate
  packages?  Or merge them into a single mega `emacs-goodies-el' binary
  package (with separate sections in its Info manual)?

Any comments are appreciated.

Peter