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:

> One, both for myself and when building for Windows I use worktrees. So I have
>
> emacs-git/feature/native-comp
> emacs-git/master
> emacs-git/emacs-27
>
> For personal use I build in source, for Windows building I use these for
> out of source builds.
>
> How does that work with ELPA sub-modules? Git worktrees I think hard
> links, so the files sizes are much smaller, but with submodules I am
> going to get some of ELPA and it's .git multiple times?

Hmm. Perusing https://git-scm.com/docs/gitsubmodules hints that the
submodules could be worktrees if the "Git directory located under the
$GIT_DIR/modules/" can be a worktree link, but there's no option for
'git submodule add' to specify that.

Doing a web search found:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31871888/what-goes-wrong-when-using-git-worktree-with-git-submodules

which says using worktrees that contain submodules is not a good idea.

and
https://github.com/git/git/commit/1a248cf21d450eb911d01a89c84412c2da365e66

which is 4 years old, but indicates that mixing worktrees and submodules
was an issue then.

I'll have to test some stuff. If the submodules cannot be worktrees,
then I think we have to abandon this approach. Although maybe using
--depth=1 (or some small number) would be acceptable.

> My own abortive attempt to achieve ELPA bundled packages
> (https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?h=feature/core-elpa-by-copy),
> solved one of these two problems -- a single ELPA git repo, but still
> duplicated bundled packages in each worktree.

I'll look at that.

> Two, I can live with the submodule update if I have to, but this will
> have to be done on each Worktree I guess. Why not add `configure
> --with-elpa`
>
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/log/?h=feature/core-elpa-by-copy

I'll have to look at that.

But "copy" implies that the git information is lost, so you can't edit
the copy and push the changes. That won't do.

> Three, out of source builds would I presume include the submodule in the
> main git tree, not in the out of source location?

Yes; with submodules, 'make build' (out of source or in source) doesn't use
git to retrieve files, just the filesystem.

With the alternative "only in elpa" approach, 'make build' will have to
know where the local elpa source directory is; it should still not use
git to retrieve files. For building a tarball, step one is get emacs and
elpa checked out to the right versions, then invoke 'make build'.

-- 
-- Stephe