Re: Use development sources more

[Leo Famulari]

On Sun, Nov 01, 2020 at 02:35:50PM -0500, Morgan Smith wrote:
> I would like to propose that we move towards using sources that resemble
> the development sources as closely as possible.
> 
> I like to work on Emacs and Emacs packages in my spare time. The Guix
> package transformations are gold for this. My workflow is the clone the
> source repo, make some changes and commit them, and then use the
> --with-git-url package transformation to build and test.
> 
> The problem I tend to run into in my workflow, are that packages don't
> tend to build from the development source. This is the reason I readded
> emacs-next.

So, in this case, the salient difference between the 'emacs' and
'emacs-next' packages is that emacs-next's source is their Git repo,
whereas emacs uses the release tarball? 

We do base packages on Git repos very often, largely because it
increases the number of packages whose sources are "backed up" by
Software Heritage, and because lots of projects don't offer "real"
tarballs anymore — they may not even have "versions".

Guix is a lot of things but it's primarily a software distribution with
operating system. I think it's important that we distribute the things
that upstream developers intend to be distributed.