Re: Reconsider defaults for use-package-vc-prefer-newest

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Suhail Singh <suhailsingh247@gmail.com> writes:

> Philip, I am summarizing below some thoughts / suggestions that I have
> shared elsewhere in this discussion for your benefit.  If you're already
> aware and are caught up with the discussion, please ignore (and excuse
> the noise).

A single message rarely constitutes noise, so don't worry about it :)

> Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:
>
>> The current approach is to find the newest commit that touches a
>> version header and use that.
>
> Would it be possible to reflect the commit corresponding to the version
> in the "Other versions:" field in the output of M-x describe-package ?

Why under "Other version:" (which links to other packages).  IIRC the
commit of a VC package should appear under the commit header.  There is
the possibility of using a symbolic name if available.

I now notice that this is not the case as I had assumed... I'll try to
fix it as soon as possible.

> Doing so would make it easier for the user to check when a package that
> is available, say, in both MELPA Stable and NonGNU ELPA have the same
> claimed version, but differ in their corresponding commits.

I know that ELPA annotates packages with the commit used to produce the
package.  When the above issue is fixed, then you should be able to
compare the two commits by following the link under "Other version:".

> Additionally, if it were possible to reflect the commit date as well,
> that would be helpful as well.

I don't think there is a nice vc-generic way to extract the date of a
commit, at least without extending the vc interface any further.  I
might be mistaken though.

The other issues is that if you only have the revision string from the
ELPA server, without any checkout, it isn't easy/cheap to determine the
date even if you just wanted to support Git.

-- 
	Philip Kaludercic on siskin