bug#46441: GNU ELPA feature request: host .lz archives (as well as uncompressed) for current versions

[Mauricio Collares]

Basil L. Contovounesios <contovob@tcd.ie> writes:

> Mauricio Collares <mauricio@collares.org> writes:
>
>> Thanks for the reply! The particular use case here is to have a
>> reproducible environment via the Nix package manager. Omitting
>> irrelevant details, Nix is a source-based package manager whose
>> "recipes" for building packages typically start by doing the equivalent
>> of "download this file with this sha256 from this URL" (actually, this
>> is typically done by fetching a specific commit from a repository, but
>> in this case I believe tarballs are the only option);
>
> What are the obstacles to fetching from elpa.git here?
> E.g. http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/?h=externals/auctex

Hi Basil,

If it's possible to do this for any package, then this is a great
alternative! I see there's an elpa-packages file in the ELPA Git repo
pointing to the sources for each package, which is definitely a format
that Nix can work with. A few questions, just to be sure:

1) When does a commit to the package's repo generate a new release on
ELPA? (every commit triggers a release?)

2) Are there "exceptions" to the list in elpa-packages? That is, if a
package's repo is listed nil in elpa-packages, is it guaranteed that a
branch will exist for that package in ELPA's Git repo?

Thanks,
Mauricio