Re: Adding ELPA to Emacs core

[Phillip Lord]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> Of course, my current solution does allow use of tags instead of SHAs,
>> since you can use anywhere a SHA is valid in git, you can use a tag. But
>> I don't share your confidence that tags could be controlled on
>> ELPA. There are multiple branches, and even on master the "current
>> version" maps to multiple commits. So, you need "A-emacs-x.y.z" and
>> "B-emacs.x.y.z" where A and B are package names. Putting this much
>> semantics in a string goes against my better judgement, I think.
>
> FWIW, I tend to agree that SHAs will work at least as well as tags.
> Also if you want reproducibility, you need SHAs rather than tags.
>


One issue with my branch so far is that the packages that I have copied
into the build become built-in, and package.el doesn't see versions on
ELPA as upgrades.

I guess this brings us to a related and perhaps bigger problem. ELPA
(the web end of the archive, rather than git) doesn't support multiple
versions of packages.

Say Emacs-27 bundles bob-3.1.el which is also in ELPA. Now bob-4.1.el is
released which is an upgrade. So surely Emacs-27 should offer to update?
But, then bob-5.1.el comes out along with Emacs-28 and bob-5.1.el does
not support Emacs-27. Now Emacs-27 should no longer install
bob-5.1.el. But surely, it should allow installation of bob-4.1.el.

AFAICT, neither package.el, nor ELPA supports multiple versions with
different Emacs dependencies.

Phil