The Low-Stakes Politics of Elpas

Every programmer is motivated by money and control.  As the former is
in short supply in open-source, we emacs programmers cling nebbishly
to the latter.

Just as you don't exist unless Google finds you, your transcendent
elisp module targeting sliced bread would be hard pressed for an
audience without a listing on the Melpa archive. [1]

To the extent that "emacs" and political "power" could appear in the
same sentence without triggering snickers and guffaws from the wider
software world, the star chamber of Melpa maintainers could reasonably
claim a good-sized chunk of influence.  If you don't hew to their
dictates, you don't get listed, and now your only outlet for some
shine is hanging a fast fading shingle on /r/emacs (which is
presumably how you found this screed).

So what is it that makes Melpa special?  Like any recognized
name on the internet, they got there first.  Well, actually GNU
Elpa did, but a marketplace encumbered by ideological purity will
always fall by the wayside to one that isn't so encumbered; or put
more succinctly, "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." [2]
There's nothing technically insuperable about Craigslist, but they
were the first so that's where everyone goes to find an apartment.
Nature of the beast, I'm afraid.

But dim the halo of first mover primacy, and Melpa becomes no more
than a 20MB collection of "recipes" instructing emacs which files
within a git repo are the important ones.  To many "not invented here"
malcontents like myself, their centralized server provides a welcome
convenience, yes, but less helpfully constrains us to Melpa's uptime,
their arbitrary build schedule, and most vexatiously, their botched
versioning scheme.

I'm certainly not the first to notice the emperor's diaphanous duds.
Alternative "headless" schemes like *quelpa* and *straight* seek to
dispel the notion that DIY is a bridge too far.  But none can replace
Melpa's name recognition (such as it is in our niche world) that
compels emacs programmers desperate for affirmation to want to list on
Melpa.  The GNU people won't cop to it, but it's clear to everyone,
not just us cynics, that the Non-GNU Elpa initiative is a direct
response to Melpa's incursion. [3] Had Melpa hewed to FSF doctrine,
the effrontery would have been easier to stomach, but also realize
that had Melpa toed the party line, it would never have achieved its
current size.

--

[1] Well, by "audience" I mean approximately a hundred guys since the
vast majority of emacs users rock a dessicated copy of emacs-24.3
bundled with their fusty corporate distribution, and are oblivious
that user contributed packages even exist.  I know because for many,
many years I numbered among these incurious philistines.

[2] *Spaceballs* (1987)

[3] It was odd that RMS himself, folk legend responsible for saving
generations of cash-poor undergraduates billions of dollars that would
have gone to Microsoft, cared enough about the matter to personally
advertise Non-GNU Elpa.  I mean, who cares that a rinky-dink outpost
called Melpa hosts a Pinterest-like elisp collection ("Obviously you
do!", shouts the gallery).