Add oz Emacs to MELPA repo

[mcandre]

I like how oz-mode comes builtin with Mozart/Oz, and how it's offered on Marmalade. That makes it convenient to view and edit Oz code in environments where you don't have Oz installed. Could we also add this package to MELPA?

[sjmackenzie]

What a great idea, why not?

[milkypostman]

We would be happy to work with someone to make changes to MELPA so that this package could be included but if you have a look at melpa/melpa#749 you can see that there are some code changes that would need to be made so that some of the pre-processing your build files do can be done by our server when processing the .el.in files.

If there is someone passionate about taking this on and helping us work on a solution please feel free to swing over to melpa/melpa#750 and let us know what we can do.

[sjmackenzie]

Pull requests are welcome!

What exactly is needed to make this work with MELPA?

[milkypostman]

Minor issue: The .el file does follow the necessary conventions for packages. Also the file would need to be named mozart.el but that is something we can deal with if there is significant issue to changing the naming.

Major issue: The file has some entries like $version$ that apparently get replaced by the Makefile? Normally a file like this needs to have a line like,

;; Version: 1.0

or some other version besides 1.0. It's actually irrelevant to us because we replace the line but we require some well-formed line to be there because we use the package-buffer-info function to extract info from the file during our build process and that function will throw an exception if the Version line is not present.

We have considered, many times, allowing for preprocessing on our end---our server is creating packages from the source---but we do not allow arbitrary Makefiles from the repos themselves.

I think in this case what should be done is,

• Rename the file to mozart.el
• Update the file to have the proper format for packaging.
• Add a line that is ;; Version: 0
• Change the Makefile to look for a line starting with ;; Version: and have it replace that line with the correct version number.

I apologize that I don't have the time or the interest in doing this. Possibly someone here, like @mcandre, would be willing to help?