Re: [PATCH 3/5] build: Add 'emacs-build-system'

[Federico Beffa]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 6:58 PM, Alex Kost <address@hidden> wrote:
> A side note: I think generally it would be preferable to use an upstream
> release in the package recipe rather than to use a melpa(-stable) URL,
> i.e.:
>
>   http://foo-upstream.org/foo-0.1.tar.gz  instead of
>   http://stable.melpa.org/packages/foo-0.1.tar

I believe that such information is not available from ELPA archives.
Therefore the ELPA importer has no way to do this. But, obviously,
manual modification is possible. (By the way, the tar files are
similar but not identical.)

>
> Also along with the concern that melpa stores a tarball only for the
> latest package version I think I've found another problem that will
> happen with a package from any repository: there are many single-file
> packages and these ones are not put in tarballs.  I mean the package in
> this case is just a simple elisp file, so the 'unpack' will fail.
>
> Look at <http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/rainbow-mode.html> for example:
>
>   guix import elpa --archive=gnu rainbow-mode
>
> gives a package that fails on 'unpack' phase.

Currently this can be handled, as in many packages using other build
systems, by custom phases. But handling of this type of packages would
definitely be useful. Unfortunately, in the near future, I will not
have time to spend on this. I've pushed the code as reviewed on the ML
today. If you are interested, feel free to improve/extend it.

Regards,
Fede