How to build nongnu packages locally?

[Ruijie Yu]

Hello,

I'm having trouble building nongnu packages locally.  In particular, the
packages which depend on GNU Elpa packages.  This is what I did:

    $ git clone savannah/nongnu.git --depth=1 --single-branch
    $ cd nongnu
    $ make
    $ make fetch/magit # magit depends on compat in GNU Elpa
    $ make packages/magit # this sets up the worktree
    $ make packages/magit # building magit fails

The error message:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
Byte compiling packages/magit/lisp/git-commit.el
Unable to activate package ‘magit’.
Required package ‘compat-29.1.3.4’ is unavailable

In toplevel form:
packages/magit/lisp/git-commit.el:120:2: Error: Cannot open load file: No such 
file or directory, compat
make: *** [GNUmakefile:119: packages/magit/lisp/git-commit.elc] Error 1
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Note that both git-commit.el (the current file) and magit.el (the main
file) contain dependency headers like such:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
;; Package-Requires: (
;;     (emacs "25.1")
;;     (compat "29.1.3.4")
;;     (transient "0.3.6")
;;     (with-editor "3.0.5"))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

What am I missing?  Any hints appreciated.

The reason I want to build nongnu packages locally is because I am
trying to set up a local Elpa repository (which may depend on packages
on GNU or nongnu Elpa), and realized that it was unable to take
dependencies from either, so I wanted to take inspiration from nongnu
and see how it takes depencency from GNU Elpa.

PS: While testing it before sending the mail, I noticed that make does
not error out if the fetch operation fails due to network issues.
Please let me know if I should send this separately, and where I should
send it (here or bug list?).

PS 2: I noticed that the initial "make" (pulling the elpa-admin branch
of elpa.git) took some time to finish in my network environment.  Is
there interest in implementing a shallow fetch, using something like
--shallow-since, etc., when make receives a "shallow-since=..."  param?
Again, if this belongs to a new thread, let me know.

Thanks.

-- 
Best,


RY