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

[Stephen Leake]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>
>> Cc: dgutov@yandex.ru,  phillip.lord@russet.org.uk,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 06:37:41 -0800
>> 
>> > By "branch" here do you mean an elpa.git branch?  If so, we can have a
>> > single elpa.git branch where each package is represented by a suitable
>> > commit, right?  For example, we can have a "stable" branch in
>> > elpa.git, where the last commit of each package corresponds to the
>> > latest stable version of that package.  Is that possible?
>> 
>> Yes, you could create a branch that merges all the bundled packages
>> (from their separate branches) together,
>> 
>> However, if you then make changes in that merged branch (which we
>> definitely want to support), it is not simple to propagate them back to
>> the separate branches; you have to cherry-pick.
>
> I don't think we want to maintain the bundled packages inside the
> Emacs repository.  IOW, the flow of changes should be unidirectional:
> from elpa.git to emacs.git, but not in the other direction.

As a rule, yes. But part of the point of doing this via git is allow
occasional edits in the emacs source tree, and have those edits
propagate back to the upstream.

For emacs developers that do not also have a local elpa repository,
that's the only way to fix a bug in a bundled package for a release.

-- 
-- Stephe