a filesystem-based package repository

[Sam Halliday]

Dear all,

The company that I work for has a firewall in place that blocks access to GNU 
ELPA and MELPA. But even if the files were mirrored, it is forbidden to 
download any software (including .el files!). Believe it or not, this is an 
increasingly common position taken by most large companies.

Getting any software into the company involves going through a lengthy process 
of requesting individual files to be downloaded, security checked, legally 
checked (thankfully GPL is allowed for applications) and made available on an 
NFS drive.

There are quite a few Emacs users in the company (100+) and we'd be really 
interested in approximating ELPA as much as possible. However, the packages 
must live in the NFS drive under the following immutable structure, per file:

/nfs/emacs/<module name>/<module 
version>/<module-name>-<module-version>.(el|tar)


1. Is it possible to have a filesystem-based ELPA repository?
2. What structure must the filesystem have?
3. What additional (index / dependency tree) files must be made available and 
how can they be created?

If the answers to all of these questions are positive, it should be possible to 
write a script to copy the latest version of each module from the NFS into a 
temporary directory in the user's home directory and run all the necessary 
indexing steps. Although, if it was possible to do it without copying the 
files, that would be a bonus.


Best regards,
Sam