Re: Local ELPA

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sun, 22 Dec 2013 20:37:46 -0800 Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> wrote: 

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

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

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

Wouldn't it make more sense to mirror the GNU ELPA web site and support
that?  I tried to build the GNU ELPA index for testing and it was also
difficult (when I tested the :keyword extra, you can see the exchange
with Stefan).  But for your specific use case it seems that you don't
need to build from source, just mirror the files, and that will avoid
any potential dependencies on extra tools or external repositories.

Ted