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Re: Git version of ELPA


From: Dmitry Gutov
Subject: Re: Git version of ELPA
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 12:17:29 +0300
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130803 Thunderbird/17.0.8

On 13.08.2013 04:42, Stefan Monnier wrote:
To merge elpa changes back into the external repository, the best option
is to cherry-pick patches.  I don't think there's any VCS that can
handle this side of the sync semi-automatically, because I don't know of
any VCS that handles two-way syncs (except maybe for the special case where
both sides are meant to be exact mirrors, but even those can be
tricky).  So subtrees don't make any difference in this respect, AFAIK.

From your initial message in this thread, I thought we were talking about the "git subtree" command, which is a plugin that was merged into core not so long ago.

I've played around with it a bit, and it does seem to help with syncing both ways, even when commits in the parent repo touch several subtrees.

To pull:

git subtree pull --prefix packages/js2-mode address@hidden:mooz/js2-mode.git

To split commits and push them back:

git subtree push --prefix packages/js2-mode address@hidden:mooz/js2-mode.git

The second command, from what I can tell, does require that the subtree had been properly imported from the remote repository.

Notes:
1) I tried this on toy repos, not real ones. I can send them for you to examine, if you like. 2) If packages/js2-mode and address@hidden:mooz/js2-mode.git differ in files they contain, I imagine we'll have more errors or conflicts to deal with.

That would be nice.  I did not insist on it, because my tests showed
that you can "subtree merge" an external branch after-the-fact: with
Bazaar this resulted in serious problems, whereas with Git this is
handled sanely (not as well as having the external branch merged
right from the start, of course, but good enough).

AFAIK, "git subtree" uses and builds on the subtree merge strategy.

With subtrees, I can do

    bzr merge --subtree <external-branch>

and it will work whatever has changed since the last merge of
that branch.  But that was already true to some extent with Bzr.
The difference is that this now works without "bzr join" and its bugs
(and also that most external branches are using Git, so we also avoid
the bugs of bzr-git).

I.e. instead of "bzr join" which can only add a new tree, I can do

    bzr merge --subtree <external-branch>

for a branch that I've never merged before: for lack of a common
ancestor it can't know what's new and what isn't, but it does
the sane thing: a 2-way "merge".

I'm assuming you meant "git merge" in all of the above.

The `elpa' code will always tend to include local changes.  Less is
better, but they're a fact of life.
Inside package directories?

Yes.

How necessary is that?

Indispensible.

If you mean bugfixes touching several packages at once,

Not only.  The difference can have to do with packaging, or with
non-copyright-assigned code, ...

I imagine that projects that have this issue (Org, for one... any other examples?) already maintain a separate branch in the upstream repository (called 'gnu', for example), and this branch is copyright-clean already, so our syncing workflow shouldn't be concerned about that.

Projects that don't, can adopt this practice going forward.

Syncing between the master and gnu branches in the upstream repo should be a) easier, b) usually none of our business (but we'd still be able to make some fixes, if they are meant to be pushed upstream).

In any case it's the responsibility of the package's maintainer to feed
elpa changes back to the external branch, if any.

Maybe so. But 'git subtree' seems to make this less painful, as long as ELPA doesn't go deliberately out of sync.

The -pkg.el is the one that holds the metadata, so it's pretty
important.  We could get by without it if <pkg>/<pkg>.el contains the
corresponding info in the usual single-file format, but currently the
presence of <pkg>-pkg.el is used to indicate that this is a multifile
package rather than a singlefile package, so we'd need that
info elsewhere.

That's what I meant, yes. We'll need a mechanism to include/exclude files anyway.

Mostly same story for README, except that it's a bit easier (the code
I have might already fallback to reading the Commentary section of
<pkg>/<pkg>.el if the README file is missing).

It does, e.g. for the websocket package.

2) Can we handle having README.md (and probably other formats),

Yes.  Patches welcome (tho you might like to wait before the new Git
repository is in place, since the code is being rewritten as we speak).

If we're okay with showing non-preprocessed Markdown, Org and similar files as plain text, that should be easy. Markdown reads fine that way, at least.

.travis.yml, Makefile, extra dirs and .el files not meant for end
users? Like `doc', extras', `yasnippet-debug.el' and
`yasnippet-tests.el' in the yasnippet repository on GitHub.

Currently, you can have extra (ignored) files only for singlefile
packages.  Multifile packages will package up whatever is present.
But it should be easy to add some way to list files that should be
skipped.  IOW, same as above "patch is welcome, tho you might like to
wait a bit".

I'd welcome a suggestion for the exact mechanism. List them in a file called '.elpa-includes'?

If implementing it is going to be a lot of work, are we willing to take
package-build.el from the Melpa project and adapt it, or reuse some of its
pieces?

Hmm... I didn't think about that.  Kinda stupid, eh?
It's probably a bit late, tho (I have most of the old code adjusted
already).  In any case, for enhancements, it's probably a good idea to
look there.

If maybe, do we care about copyright assignments for its code?

We would, of course.

I wasn't sure, because the contents of admin/archive-contents.el just live on the server, and as such are different from the packages and the Emacs sources.

You'd have to ask Yidong, but I have the impression that yasnippet was
not installed in GNU ELPA in a straightforward way to start with
(usually I try to limit changes to copyright-fix up and things like
that); but sadly I can't remember details about that.

We'll need to deal with it eventually, but this version is not actually too old. Yanippet development has been relatively slow the last few months.



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