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: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  phillip.lord@russet.org.uk,
>>   emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2021 14:00:07 -0800
>> 
>> 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.
>
> By "branch" here do you mean an elpa.git branch?  If so, we can have a
> single elpa.git branch where each package is represented by a suitable
> commit, right?  For example, we can have a "stable" branch in
> elpa.git, where the last commit of each package corresponds to the
> latest stable version of that package.  Is that possible?

Yes, you could create a branch that merges all the bundled packages
(from their separate branches) together,

However, if you then make changes in that merged branch (which we
definitely want to support), it is not simple to propagate them back to
the separate branches; you have to cherry-pick.

Keeping the release branches of bundled ELPA packages in emacs.git is
simpler.

-- 
-- Stephe