Re: Allowing rolling release packages on ELPA

[Bozhidar Batsov]

Well the argument about MELPA is a bit misplaced, as there's also MELPA Stable. I mean snapshots are not a bad idea if you know what you're doing (I'm using MELPA myself), but most packages still have "stable" releases. I can't think of a single package that I use that doesn't get tagged releases from time to time.

I was also under the impression that there are already ELPA and NonGNU devel repositories that behave like MELPA, so I'm not sure what would we be solving then.

Every patch is probably a feature or a bug-fix to some aspect of the package. As a user, I want those as soon as they are

available.

Often that's not the case - patches can be improvements to docs, build infrastructure, small steps towards some new features, etc.

Not having to version things manually is a god-send.

It saves a tiny bit of time for the maintainers and makes life a bit harder for the end users IMO. Anyways, perspective on this subject will always vary. For me updating a couple of version numbers in a package is an insignificant amount of work (and it's work that's trivial to automate).

On Mon, Oct 24, 2022, at 9:45 AM, Jostein Kjønigsen wrote:

On 24.10.2022 08:14, Bozhidar Batsov wrote:

The patch seems fine to me, but I'm a bit skeptical about the whole rolling releases idea in general

This is the default operation for MELPA, which arguably has more popular packages than ELPA.

It works fine.

should something like a change to the docs really result in a new release?

Yes. Unconditionally.

Every patch is probably a feature or a bug-fix to some aspect of the package. As a user, I want those as soon as they are available.

How hard it is for people to actually update version timestamps themselves or to just stick to the *-devel repos if they don't want to cut releases?

As a package-developer, I may release patches weekly, but I update main versions maybe once every second year, if/when someone bothers me about it.

Not having to version things manually is a god-send.

How much was the demand for something like this in general? I can't think of any major Emacs package that does rolling releases.

All of them does, if they're on MELPA. That's what MELPA does.

--

Jostein