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

[Stephen Leake]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> On 24.01.2021 22:15, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> IMO, people who are interested only in packages bundled with Emacs
>> should not need to have ELPA on their local machines.  Not even one
>> checkout of ELPA should be needed.  They should just need to clone the
>> Emacs Git repository (modulo the submodules-related options), and
>> that's all.  Exactly like they do today: there's no need to clone ELPA
>> to have a fully functional clone of the Emacs Git repository.
>
> Git allows one to check out one branch's contents, without the rest of
> the repository.

Just to be clear, "checkout" means retrieve from a local git repository
into a directory tree; that is always a single branch.

> So said people wouldn't need to download the whole of ELPA, if you
> were worried about that.

"clone" and "add submodule" download from the remote repository.

"add submodule -b <branch>" specifies what branch to checkout, but still
downloads the whole repository.

Ah; "clone ... --single-branch --branch <branch>" allows downloading
only that branch into the local repository. But you can't specify more
than one branch, so that would be inconvenient for more than one bundled
package.

And "git add submodule" does not accept --single-branch.

-- 
-- Stephe