Re: [PATCH 3/5] build: Add 'emacs-build-system'

[Federico Beffa]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Alex Kost <address@hidden> wrote:
> Federico Beffa (2015-07-08 23:22 +0300) wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 6:58 PM, Alex Kost <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> A side note: I think generally it would be preferable to use an upstream
>>> release in the package recipe rather than to use a melpa(-stable) URL,
>>> i.e.:
>>>
>>>   http://foo-upstream.org/foo-0.1.tar.gz  instead of
>>>   http://stable.melpa.org/packages/foo-0.1.tar
>>
>> I believe that such information is not available from ELPA archives.
>> Therefore the ELPA importer has no way to do this. But, obviously,
>> manual modification is possible. (By the way, the tar files are
>> similar but not identical.)
>
> Surely, I didn't mean that it's a task for the elpa importer.  I'm
> totally for the manual modification to use an upstream release, not the
> melpa(-stable) one.
>
> By "the tar files are similar" do you mean that MELPA usually leaves
> only elisp files in the tarballs?  I think since it's a common practice
> to put elisp files in the root directory of the repo, we should add a
> phase to the emacs build system to remove non-elisp files (like
> .gitignore or README) from the final
> /gnu/store/…-foo-0.1/share/emacs/site-lisp/guix.d/foo-0.1/ directory.

One difference that I noticed in the tar files is that tar coming from
elpa archives always include the .info file, while the upstream ones
do not always do so. I've not investigated further differences.

While often the READMEs are not very usefull, sometimes they are.
Therefore I do not like the idea of removing them, nor anything else
provided by the package. It's upstream who should decide what's
relevant. With the use of 'guix.d' there will be no name clashes. Did
you happen to see the following thread?

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-06/msg00392.html

Fede