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

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk> writes:

> The nice thing about is that it unifies package management. It worries
> me slightly that Emacs will be saying "Emacs uses package.el to manage
> packages and their dependencies". But, then when looking at bundled
> packages, we are saying "Emacs uses submodules". Two different systems
> to achieve the same thing.

It's not really "the same thing"; in the case of bundled packages, we
also need to support testing emacs releases with the bundled packages
via git branches (and tarballs), making the release tarball,
building from the unpacked tarball, and running from the unpacked and
built tarball.

Using submodules makes testing via git branches easy. However, as you
have pointed out, using submodules breaks git worktrees. So we have to
choose. I'll add some rationale for both choices in my next writeup.

Making the tarball, and building and running from the unpacked tarball
require that the bundled ELPA packages appear in the emacs source
directory tree. It's better for emacs developers who do both if that is
consistent with an emacs directory tree created via checkout from git;
the bundled packages should be in the same place.

-- 
-- Stephe