Re: Core ELPA was: Testing fontification, indentation, and buffer manipulation

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> I could move the dependency to Makefile.in I guess? Then a simple
>> ./configure wouldn't change things, but any textual change in
>> Makefile.in would. Or, I could check the repo for the SHA-1 first and if
>> this doesn't exist, the run git fetch.
>
> My opinion is that the problem in in having the SHAs in Makefile.in.
> I think Makefile.in should refer to branches/tags rather than to SHAs.

I thought about that. Actually, the code would cope with branches and
tags, but I think they are both a bad idea.

The problem with branches is that what is on the branch changes. My
feeling is that the build process should be repeatable; so building
emacs-27.1-with-elpa.tgz should not result in different tar balls as
ELPA changes.

The problem with tags is that with ELPA as a single git, tags share a
single namespace. Otherwise, people could just add "emacs-27.1" or
whatever to say which version of the package should be for
Emacs-27.1. But this would require all ELPA packages on master to
choose the same point in time for a release and would not work at all
for packages on a branch.

Finally, neither solve the problem -- if a branch or tag is add
EMACS/elpa/Makefile.in which exists in the ELPA repo, but not in the
clone on the local machine the build will fail.



> PS: Also, every time Makefile.in changes, `make` re-runs config.status
> which then causes all the .o files to be recompiled as well, so I'd
> rather we don't change it all too often.

Oh, yes, that's true. Putting those eval calls into the Makefile is
pretty ugly. I can move the SHA data out into a secondary file no
worries.

Phil