Re: Git version of ELPA

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> 2) If packages/js2-mode and git@github.com:mooz/js2-mode.git differ in files
> they contain, I imagine we'll have more errors or conflicts to deal with.

Yes and no: the "push" would simply force the github version to have
the same content as the elpa version.  No conflict, but an undesirable
outcome, so you end up having to do it somewhat by hand (you can use
"git subtree split" to help, but there's still a manual intervention
needed).

>> In any case it's the responsibility of the package's maintainer to feed
>> elpa changes back to the external branch, if any.
> Maybe so. But 'git subtree' seems to make this less painful, as long as ELPA
> doesn't go deliberately out of sync.

Yes.  The elpa-diffs email as well (a copy is sent to the maintainer).

>>> 2) Can we handle having README.md (and probably other formats),
>> Yes.  Patches welcome (tho you might like to wait before the new Git
>> repository is in place, since the code is being rewritten as we speak).
> If we're okay with showing non-preprocessed Markdown, Org and similar files
> as plain text, that should be easy. Markdown reads fine that way, at least.

Hopefully we can do better than that, but as a first step, yes, that's
definitely fine.

>> Currently, you can have extra (ignored) files only for singlefile
>> packages.  Multifile packages will package up whatever is present.
>> But it should be easy to add some way to list files that should be
>> skipped.  IOW, same as above "patch is welcome, tho you might like to
>> wait a bit".
> I'd welcome a suggestion for the exact mechanism.

A simple solution is to not remove those files from the `elpa' branch.
I.e. consider it as a "local change".  It might lead to spurious
conflicts when merging, tho.

> List them in a file called .elpa-includes'?

I'd rather have a list of exclusions than a list of inclusions, but
other than that I guess that'd be right.  So we could easily handle
a list of exclusions by passing the list to "tar".


        Stefan