Re: emacs packages and elpa

[Nicolas Goaziou]

Hello,

Cayetano Santos <csantosb@inventati.org> writes:

>   We distribute emacs packages from gnu/elpa by downloading .tar files
>   from there: I’m thinking about emacs-ggtags.
>
>   My first concern is, what emacs-ggtags 0.9.0 corresponds to exactly ?
>   There is no 0.9.0 tag in upstream github reposotory, and, if I
>   understand it correctly, elpa just mirrors it
>
>     https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/log/?h=externals/ggtags
>
>   So what exactly 0.9.0 is ? They bump on the 2018-07-26.  Does it refer
>   to something more recent ? How to know ? This is for sure elpa
>   related, ... but we are distributing packages based on their criteria.
>   It would be great to understand how it goes (at this point, I cannot
>   clone elpa, for some reason).

For Emacs packages, "Version" keyword in main file, here "ggtags.el", is
more important than tags because each time that keyword is updated,
a new release happens on ELPA. In a nutshell, "0.9.0" refers to the
commit that updated the keyword.

>   My second concern is, how do we distribute some more up to date (think
>   emacs-magit), if we use a .tar from elpa ? When developer decides not
>   to / forgets to tag a new release, how do we proceed ? Do we use
>   elpa.gnu.org/devel instead ? I cannot see any example of guix
>   sources.

As pointed out, upstream tags do not matter for ELPA release cycles. If
you need to package a more up-to-date package (with good reasons,
I hope), you just point source to upstream instead of ELPA.

HTH,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou