Re: Use development sources more

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Morgan,

Morgan Smith <Morgan.J.Smith@outlook.com> skribis:

> 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.
>
> For Emacs packages we use elpa even if it doesn't resemble the
> development sources.
>
> For example, emacs-modus-operandi-theme and emacs-modus-vivendi-theme
> are found in the same upstream repository. If you use the --with-git-url
> transformation on either of these packages, you'll get an extra unwanted
> file.

Like Leo writes, I think it can be a good idea to refer to Git
repositories instead of tarballs provided we refer to release tags, not
arbitrary commits in the project histories.

However, we have to check with the main contributors to emacs.scm and
emacs-xyz.scm whether moving away from ELPA tarballs is feasible and
desirable.  There may be other things at play!

Thanks,
Ludo’.