Re: policy discussion on bundling ELPA packages in the emacs tarball

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>
> Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2021 01:27:15 -0800
> Cc: emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> writes:
> 
> > I'll have to test some stuff. If the submodules cannot be worktrees,
> > then I think we have to abandon this approach. Although maybe using
> > --depth=1 (or some small number) would be acceptable.
> 
> I've played with 'git submodules' on Windows mingw64. You can pass a
> local ELPA repository to 'git submodules add', but it copies the whole
> thing into the emacs repository:

It is quite clear that ELPA will need some changes on its side to
support this integration.  One such change is to have branches that
roughly correspond to Emacs's 'master' and 'release' branches, because
we would want to have only the stable branches of the ELPA packages to
be visible on the Emacs's release branch.

> There is not a way to specify the branch in the 'git submodule add'
> command

AFAIU, you can do that in the .gitmodules file.

> With worktrees, we don't have git commands that operate on all the
> bundled packages at once, as 'git submodules ...' does. However, we'll
> be using an emacs front-end for edit/push/pull anyway.

Not necessarily: we need Git commands to support that in some way in
order to be able to build a release or pretest tarball.