Re: Adding ELPA to Emacs core

[Phillip Lord]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> It would *only* be used during a development build. During a "normal"
>> from source tarball, all the files would already been in place.
>
> Is there some way to "pin" a package to particular revision (on release
> branches, we'll want to do that for all packages)?


At the moment, it's the opposite. There isn't any way to unpin. Packages
are pulled out by a specific SHA individual for each package. This is
necessary because ELPA is a mixed economy: packages on branches will
have a different SHA from HEAD on master; and on trunk, package releases
are not co-ordinated, so each package needs to define it's own SHA.

Personally, I think that this is correct and not just for release
branches. Otherwise, the build would be far from repeatable, depending
on the state of ELPA. Having a "ignore the make file and take HEAD"
would be a nice option to have for running on a CI system.

It would also be possible to support other repos beyond ELPA
(i.e. org-mode has it's own git and we could take from there
directly). Whether this is a good idea or not, I leave as an open
question.

One thing that does worry me is that it means Emacs source as references
to ELPA git. If Emacs (or ELPA) ever needs to move VCS, it's going to
require some significant hackery.

Phil