Local ELPA

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

I'm finally getting around to ELPA-izing my configuration. Instead of 
downloading packages from the official repository on every machine I 
use, I'd like to just mirror ELPA into my local configuration repository 
(using git subtree) and "install" packages from the local directory. 
This way, my entire configuration is a nice versioned repository, and 
all changes are visible.

This approach doesn't work because a plain git checkout of the ELPA 
packages directory lacks the index files needed. update-archive.sh is 
supposed to build these files, but it doesn't seem to be able to 
bootstrap itself --- if .changelog-witness doesn't exist, 
achive-prepare-packages fails. The update script also assumes that it's 
being run in an isolated git repository.

Right now, I think I'm going to skip most of the package.el niceties and 
just symlink directly into my copy of ELPA HEAD, but that's not a good 
solution. There really should be a good way of using an arbitrary local 
directory full of elisp as an ELPA repository.