To be clear - I'm not arguing against the inclusion of this. :-) Assuming the package maintainers know what they are doing, that'd be perfectly fine by me.
Well, normally there's no "regular version" when you're doing rolling releases. If there is - those would not be rolling releases, but snapshots between regular releases. I know that MELPA preserves the original version, but I think that doesn't make sense for a real rolling release.
> Instead of setting version numbers manually (e.g. 0.1, 0.2) upon
> release time, with rolling releases every change (commit) pushed
> upstream results automatically in a new release and a version bump,
> with the version being a timestamp.
Not quite, the time stamp is appended to the regular version number.
> E.g. if I push 3 commits one day
> with some time between them this will result in 3 releases. I think
> it's a great approach for snapshot (devel) repos, but I'm not so sure
> about "stable" repos, as it kinda of implies that the author will
> never have their project in an inconsistent state (e.g. halfway
> towards a new feature).
Right, so it would only be used whenever a package author prefers that
method of development.
>
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2022, at 11:14 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
>> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
>> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>>
>> > I have heard from people who prefer a rolling release model for their
>> > packages,
>>
>> Can you explain what that means, concretely? How is t different from
>> what we do now?
It is currently necessary to bump the version tag in the package header
to indicate that a release is to be made. If a package specification
has a non-nil :rolling-release tag, then this is done whenever the
repository is synchronised.
>> and requested that their packages not be added for {Non,}GNU
>> > ELPA if they would have to update the version header manually,
>> > presumably on every commit.
>>
>> Is this something we would _want_ to do? What would its implications
>> be for Emacs?
It wouldn't affect Emacs, just packages that request this kind of
release management.
>> We might decide to support their style of release, or decide not to
>> include their packages in NonGNU ELPA, or we might come up with
>> another solution. I don't know what's best. But I'm sure we should
>> think about that before we decide.
If the only issue a package has is that it is developed using a "rolling
release" model, it would be nonsensical for us to not accommodate the
request and reject a (perhaps popular) package on that ground.