Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

>> Now your function is working fine and nearly finish, did you think how
>> you are going to distribute it? It seems you are going to merge it in
>> master, but what about providing it as well as a Elpa package so that
>> users of old emacs (at some point of course, say emacs-27) can use it to
>> report bugs?
>
> I am not a fan of small ELPA packages, but what I'd like to bring up
> again was the proposal to add package.el itself to ELPA.  I wrote a
> patch in <873559q83j.fsf@posteo.net> that should arrange everything
> necessary for this move, there are still a few points that should be
> discussed in terms of stability and recovering from a possibly
> inconsistent state.  I think I'll create a feature branch some day soon
> to make the proposal more concrete.

I have pushed the patch from that thread, together with a patch for
package-vc and a custom command that would revert Emacs to use the
built-in version of package.el.  The branch is called
"feature/elpa-package", and I have added to tarballs with packages built
by elpa-admin.el in case anyone wants to try out the packages.  I'll be
testing these tarballs with older versions of Emacs, to see how that
works out.