Provide xml-query.el as a separate package

[marsam]

Hi:
Thanks for your work in elfeed. Would you mind releasing xml-query.el as a separate package in melpa. I really think the Emacs ecosystem would benefit from this package.

Thanks in advance!

[skeeto]

Ultimately that would probably be a good thing, but I have two selfish objections, most important first: 1. Elfeed has no dependencies outside of Emacs. This is incredibly convenient for development, testing, and stability -- so much so that I've become very hesitant to have any dependencies in any of my packages. Putting xml-query on Melpa would essentially mean moving it out of Elfeed and making it a dependency. 2. By not encouraging people to use it, I don't have to worry much about supporting the various use cases. It only has to work exactly well enough for Elfeed's needs. Do you have a particular use in mind?

[marsam]

Hi:

Sorry for the late response.

1. Elfeed has no dependencies outside of Emacs. This is incredibly convenient
   for development, testing, and stability -- so much so that I've become very
   hesitant to have any dependencies in any of my packages. Putting xml-query
   on Melpa would essentially mean moving it out of Elfeed and making it a
   dependency.

I think this can be solved separating the melpa recipe

• current

  (elfeed :repo "skeeto/elfeed"
          :fetcher github)

• New recipes

  (elfeed :repo "skeeto/elfeed"
          :fetcher github
          :files (:defaults
                  (:exclude "xml-query.el")))

  (xml-query :repo "skeeto/elfeed"
             :fetcher github
             :files ("xml-query.el"))

This approach is used by ivy recipe to maintain swiper and counsel as separated packages.

If you like this idea I can make a pull request to melpa with the new recipes.

Do you have a particular use in mind?

Nothing in particular, I just want to use xml-query.el for interacting with
xml based services.

[skeeto]

For this recipe to work, I guess I'd need to add a version header to xml-query.el, and add xml-query as a dependency in elfeed-pkg.el? For MELPA stable, I guess this also means the xml-query and elfeed version numbers are kept in lock-step, since they share tags. This appears to be the case with Ivy's components, and that's how it works with elfeed-web. It also means there may be a brief period where the Elfeed package is broken, until both Elfeed and the recipe are in sync.

[alphapapa]

Curious, is there any reason to proceed with this? I just experimented with esxml-query, and it works very well, so is there any benefit that this library could provide over it?

Well, I guess the macros would be faster when using hard-coded selectors, right? Maybe that could be added to esxml-query? =)

Thanks.

[skeeto]

@alphapapa You're right. Now that esxml exists, I'd rather people rely on that package instead of a subset of Elfeed. It doesn't (yet?) have the cool compile-to-byte-code stuff, but it's always going to be more feature-complete. I don't want to add any features to xml-query unless Elfeed needs it.

So I'm just going to close this and say, "Use esxml."