Re: Reconsider defaults for use-package-vc-prefer-newest

[Philip Kaludercic]

"Martin Edström" <meedstrom@runbox.eu> writes:

> On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 06:57:40 +0200, Tony Zorman <tonyzorman@mailbox.org> 
> wrote:
>> > The thing is that with use-package, having a more deterministic
>> > installation is of interest, especially since use-package is used to
>> > automatically set up an Emacs environment.
>> 
>> I feel like the only way to actually guarantee a deterministic
>> installation procedure is to use outside means (that is, to ping
>> packages to specific versions/commits, either manually or with nix
>> et.al). This can certainly be done with package-vc.el as well, but
>> that's not what happens when one just uses :last-release.
>> 
>>   Tony
>
> Yea, I've recently thought that when you have an ecosystem that grew
> ad-hoc and has not very rigid curating, the solution isn't necessarily
> to start trying to pressure everyone into a reliable release cadence
> and break innocents' initfiles on the way. This isn't corporate, we're
> all lisping for free, and have to lisp smart, not hard. A Pareto
> solution would seem to be lockfiles. That is, an autogenerated file
> specifying pinned versions or commits.

As mentioned before, both ELPA repositories requires releases to be
tagged, and it is not a problem.

> Say there's a file "~/.emacs.d/versions.toml" containing lines such as
>
> vertico = "1.9.0.33"
> consult = "1.8.0.2"
> ess = "24.0.20"
> elpaca = "0.0.2.0.34"
>
> and every time you upgrade, you can have the option of trying to
> upgrade everything at once, rolling back after you find it breaks,
> only upgrade some of them etc.  (Rolling back is a pretty important
> part)

Modulo the part of having separate files in a non-sexp format, this is a
good idea, that I don't think anyone would object to in principle.

> This would be deterministic and everything.  Actually it sort of
> already happens with use-package, nevermind whether it fetches the
> latest snapshot or a "release version", because it's not as if it will
> auto-update every time you start Emacs, only when you manually tell it
> to update. The missing piece is for the user to know how to check
> their `elpa/` subdirectory into a git repo that they can rollback, but
> that's asking a lot for most users.
>
> You might have noticed in the mockup above that I appended a ".0.X"
> number to all the versions.  That's because commit pinning is ugly and
> unsemantic. Here X is just the number of commits since the last
> "release version", no matter how long ago that was.  So Vertico
> 1.9.0.33 is the snapshot that's 33 commits after Vertico 1.9. It's
> totally possible to do something like that (got the idea from
> https://github.com/melpa/package-build/pull/81).
>
> If a developer has no Package-Version and no git tag, it could just be 
> forever at 0.0.X.
>

-- 
        Philip Kaludercic on siskin