Re: Emacs release and bundling GNU Elpa

[Artur Malabarba]

>> > and less exposure of packages to people who track development on
>> > master,
>>
>> These packages will effectively be part of master.
>
> Only if one decides to pull them.  Since that's at least a bit of an
> additional hassle, one could decide not to bother.

If this is taken forward, copying these packages sources from elpa.git
to emacs not be optional, i.e., it will be a mandatory step in the
make command. This is the only way for other packages in “./lisp/” to
be able to depend on these imported packages.
Updating the submodule will only be necessary once in a while (when
the configuration file specifies a newer version for a package than
the version you have locally, and the makefile will tell you about
that), but it will be necessary.

>> >  . We'd need to find a way of providing ChangeLogs for the packages,
>> >    either by merging their Git logs somehow, or by keeping their
>> >    ChangeLogs in separate directories (which would mean each package
>> >    will have its own directory, making load-path longer).
>>
>> Keep their ChangeLogs in the same place as their source (in the
>> "./elpa.git/packages/package-name/" directory). This has nothing to do
>> with the load-path. The load-path will point to "./lisp/from-elpa"
>> (which is where we copy the sources before compiling).
>
> Aren't you forgetting that ChangeLog files need to be part of the
> release tarball?  Or do you mean we will have each package twice in a
> tarball, in 2 different directories?

Good point. How about, whenever we copy the source to
“./lisp/from-elpa/” we also copy the ChangeLog to the same place, but
rename it to something like ChangeLog-packagename? So they can all
coexist in that directory.