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: phillip.lord@russet.org.uk,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2021 09:30:35 -0800
>> 
>> > It is quite clear that ELPA will need some changes on its side to
>> > support this integration.  One such change is to have branches that
>> > roughly correspond to Emacs's 'master' and 'release' branches, because
>> > we would want to have only the stable branches of the ELPA packages to
>> > be visible on the Emacs's release branch.
>> 
>> Yes.
>> 
>> However, I don't see how that affects my point, which was that 'git add
>> submodule' appears to copy the entire ELPA repository for each bundled
>> package.
>
> I think it affects your point, because if ELPA will not present itself
> as a single monolith repository, but instead will allow us to
> submodule it at package granularity, the problem you mention will go
> away.

Currently, each package in ELPA has a dedicated branch;
external/[PKGNAME]. I think the only way to get better than that is to
split the repository itself into one repository for each package. I
suspect that's possible, but I don't think it's necessary.

I agree that we need to add release branches in elpa.git for bundled
packages.

As I said later, there's only one copy of the ELPA repository, not one
per bundled package.

Do you agree that having one full copy of the ELPA repository in your
local emacs .git repository is acceptable?

For developers who also have elpa.git cloned separately, that's a
duplicate copy.

-- 
-- Stephe