Re: State of the CEDET merge

[Lluís]

Stefan Monnier writes:

>> * freeze cedet-related changes in the emacs repository
> FWIW, strictly speaking, this is not an option.
> E.g. I had to make changes to CEDET in the lexbind branch for it to
> compile without errors.

Ok. What I meant is that changes should not be introduced *directly*
into the emacs repositories.

Instead, the emacs community should have a branch of the cedet
repository for each emacs branch.

Then, emacs devs commit into these emacs-controlled cedet branches,
which can be merged back and forth with any other cedet branch.

In order to make changes in the emacs-controlled cedet branches visible
to emacs releases, the changes must be imported somehow into the emacs
repository.

How? I have to read how the gnus people do it, because thinking about it
for a while raised a lot of non-trivial corner cases.

My question then is whether emacs is predisposed to ship a repository
that is not complete, which to me seems like the most robust and easy
way. What I mean is that instead of emacs shipping the cedet files in
its repo tree, it can contain symlinks all pointing to a directory
containing a cedet checkout (from one of the emacs-controlled branches).

Like this:

  emacs
  |- cedet-repo
  |- lisp/cedet -> ../cedet-repo/lisp/cedet
  ...

Now the question is how do you check out a copy of emacs together with
the corresponding cedet branch.

1) You can use this plugin:

      https://launchpad.net/bzr-externals

   The con is that it's not shipped in vanilla bazaar, but I don't know
   how much is to ask users to have it installed prior to checking out
   an emacs branch.

2) Let the build scripts / Makefiles perform the checkout of the cedet
   branch for you.

   This would work without any external tools, and in fact can be put
   together with the use of the bzr-externals plugin, as a backup plan.

Of course, tarballs should be shipped with the contents of both, so that
they are complete.

Thoughts?


Lluis

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