Re: Automatically saving package sources

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

sbaugh@catern.com writes:

> As an additional benefit, elpa-sources would be useful for reviewing
> changes in the source when upgrading packages.  It could be optionally
> maintained as a VCS repository, with packages saved to a constant path
> based on their name (e.g. elpa-sources/xref.el instead of
> elpa-sources/xref-1.2.3/xref.el).  Then a VCS could be used to review
> the diff resulting from an upgrade.  This would be useful for any user
> who wants to scrutinize package code changes before installing them.

This would partially overlap with the functionality provided by
package-vc.  It might be possible to re-use the functionality
wrt. building packages (e.g. building manuals, running extra commands),
that the ELPA build server takes care of when installing a package from
a tarball.

It might be, that all one needs would be to do a package-install-file?

Also, in the specific case of xref, you'd have the issue that xref.el is
maintained in emacs.git, and you cannot just checkout a subtree with
Git, so this would require tracking the entire Emacs repository,
presumably with individual checkouts for each core package you would
want to install, since the revisions one would be using wouldn't be the
same for all of them.

-- 
Philip Kaludercic