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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>
> Cc: dgutov@yandex.ru,  phillip.lord@russet.org.uk,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 16:10:07 -0800
> 
> >> 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.
> >
> > I don't think we want to maintain the bundled packages inside the
> > Emacs repository.  IOW, the flow of changes should be unidirectional:
> > from elpa.git to emacs.git, but not in the other direction.
> 
> As a rule, yes. But part of the point of doing this via git is allow
> occasional edits in the emacs source tree, and have those edits
> propagate back to the upstream.

If that can be easily supported without sacrificing anything
important, fine.  But it isn't a requirement, at least not from my
POV.

> For emacs developers that do not also have a local elpa repository,
> that's the only way to fix a bug in a bundled package for a release.

I think any Emacs developer who wants to contribute to ELPA should
have an elpa.git checkout locally.