MELPA Stable dependency is unsatisfiable

[camdez]

(In case you're not familiar, MELPA Stable is an arm of MELPA that only contains stable packages. "Stable" packages are defined by the existence of vX.X.X style tags in the project repository.)

Floobits is on MELPA Stable (due to the existence of the relevant tags), but the highlight package it depends on is not, therefore installation from MELPA Stable always fails.

If MELPA were fetching highlight from GitHub, then solving this would simply be a matter of getting the library author to tag the appropriate releases, but unfortunately the package is being pulled from Emacs Wiki. Not only does this preclude tagging releases, but the wiki is something of a sinking ship with respect to hosting source code—I think the whole community has realized at this point that code on the wiki needs to have a proper home elsewhere.

That all said, the path forward is to see if the package author (Drew Adams) is willing to host the package elsewhere. Then we can change the recipe and get the release tagged. That may sound like a lot of effort, but I've done it several times now (see the My Experience section of this blog post), and in reality it usually amounts to sending an email and making a one line PR against the MELPA repo. Plus, in this case we have the advantage that the author is still active in the Emacs community.

Alternately, it doesn't even look like floobits uses highlight extensively—it probably wouldn't be a large effort to switch to something like ov or to eliminate the dependency entirely.