NOTES ON THE EMACS PACKAGE ARCHIVE

The GNU Emacs package archive, at elpa.gnu.org, is managed using a Git
repository named "elpa", hosted on Savannah.  To check it out:

  git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs/elpa
  cd elpa
  make setup

That leaves the elpa/packages directory empty; you must check out the
ones you want.

If you wish to check out all the packages into the packages directory,
you can run the command:

   make worktrees

You can check out a specific package <pkgname> into the packages
directory with:

   make packages/<pkgname>


Changes to this repository propagate to elpa.gnu.org via a
"deployment" script run daily.  This script generates the content
visible at https://elpa.gnu.org/packages.

A new package is released as soon as the "version number" of that
package is changed.  So you can use 'elpa' to work on a package
without fear of releasing those changes prematurely.  And once the
code is ready, just bump the version number to make a new release of
the package.

It is easy to use the elpa branch to deploy a "local" copy of the
package archive.  For details, see the README file in the elpa branch.