bug#59005: 29.0.50; Package transient installed as dependency despite it being built-in

[Jonas Bernoulli]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> miha@kamnitnik.top writes:
>
>> With an empty .emacs.d directory and nonexistent .emacs.el init file,
>> installing magit with 'M-x package-install RET magit RET' pulls
>> transient from elpa. You can see it installed into ~/.emacs.d/elpa/.

That wouldn't be surprising when using Melpa.  But that archive is not
listed in the default value of `package-archives'.  What is its value
of that variable for you and what version of magit gets installed?

>> Perhaps transient should be added to finder--builtins-alist?

The purpose of doing that would be to ensure that `transient' gets its
own entry in `package--builtins' (but because it consists of a single
library it would be the wrong mechanism for doing so).  Since transient
already has such an entry in `package--builtins' anyway, doing this
would not change anything.

> Jonas, any comments here?

This is weird.  Maybe it is related to the following, which I also
cannot explain:

-------------------- Start of forwarded message --------------------
From: ELPA update <do.not.reply@elpa.gnu.org>
To: Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li>
Subject: [NonGNU-devel ELPA] Tarball build failure for magit
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2022 05:05:50 -0500

The build scripts failed to build the tarball
for version 3.3.0snapshot0.20221125.2110 of the package magit.
You can consult the latest error output in the file
"magit-build-failure.txt" in the NonGNU-devel ELPA archive web site.

You can also try and reproduce the error locally as follows:

    git clone --single-branch git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs/nongnu.git
    cd nongnu
    make                 # Setup the infrastructure
    make packages/magit  # Create a worktree of the package
    make build/magit     # Build the tarballs into archive(-devel)/

## The current error output was the following:

======== Building tarball 
archive-devel/magit-3.3.0snapshot0.20221125.2110.tar...
Build error for archive-devel/magit-3.3.0snapshot0.20221125.2110.tar: (error 
"Unavailable version \"3.3.0\" for package git-commit")
######## Build of package archive-devel/magit-3.3.0snapshot0.20221125.2110.tar 
FAILED!!
-------------------- End of forwarded message --------------------