Re: policy discussion on bundling ELPA packages in the emacs tarball

[Stefan Monnier]

> An alternative solution would be strength and automate the links between
> a package in a repo and package.el. So, package.el would be able to main
> a local package that was stored in a git repo, would like to the source,
> but would do all the autoload generation, putting into the path and so
> forth.

The `elpa-admin.el` file in the `elpa-admin` branch of `elpa.git`, which
is used to build the GNU ELPA and NonGNU ELPA tarballs also has support
for using those packages "in place":

    git clone .../elpa.git; cd elpa; make   # Generic setup, done once.
    make packages/FOO                       # Checkout package "FOO"
    make packages/BAR                       # Checkout package "BAR"
    make

gives you a directory `.../elpa/packages` which can be added to
`packages-directory-list` so that the packages are installed (from
`package.el`s point of view) straight from their Git worktree.


        Stefan