Re: elpa.git and `new-master`

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 23:46:17 -0500
> 
> - The old `master` branch has shrunk to almost nothing, yet it still
>   carries in its history all the code it used to have.  This is not
>   a big issue since that code is still around.  More importantly, the
>   `master` history includes some entries which Git nowadays considers
>   "not quite valid" (resulting in bugs#22690 and bug#25376).
>   As a result, I decided to create a fresh `new-master` branch which
>   doesn't share its history with `master`.  This new branch will replace
>   `master` in the coming days.  So whoever is tracking `master` will be
>   faced with a "non-fast-forward" update.
>   This can be annoying and I apologize in advance, but I think the
>   long terms advantages largely make up for the short term annoyance.
> 
> - On the positive side, the new code has some interesting features:
>   - It knows how to build Info files from Texinfo files, so we won't need
>     to store the generated Info files any more.
>   - It also know how to generate Info files from Org manuals.
>   - It can even run `make` as part of building the tarballs, making it
>     possible to perform various massaging.
>     This obviously can't just run "anything you like" since it depends
>     on what's available on `elpa.gnu.org`, so if you want to use this
>     feature, please get in touch with me so we can coordinate it.

Can you explain what does this mean in practice for those who, like
me, just maintain the Git repository without installing the packages
via package.el?  Whenever I need to use some package, mainly for
testing or debugging, I simply invoke that package from its place in
the Git repository.  The fact that I needed to invoke "make" for
getting the "external" packages was an annoyance, but it was a
relatively rare case.  Now it sounds like it will be much more
frequent?  Or am I confused?

IOW, what would I need to do, under this "new master", to get a
package in my local clone of the ELPA's Git repository?

TIA