Re: Why not include all ELPA packages in an Emacs release?

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Jeremy Bryant <jb@jeremybryant.net> writes:

> Would there be a problem in including a snapshot of ELPA packages in an
> Emacs release?

This has been discussed several times in the past.  There are no
principal problems, and AFAIU the consensus is that we would like to
do it, though there are some practical issues to work out.

I believe if you search the list archives, you will find previous
discussions that will shed some light on the issues involved.  We can't
just dump all packages in lisp/ and be done with it, unfortunately.

I honestly can't cite all of the problems off the top of my head.  One
is how we track developments on GNU ELPA, if we mirror packages into
emacs.git, or if we add them as submodules, or what.  At the very least,
we'd probably need to have some record of what we put into the release
tarball.  Do we add _all_ packages or just some subset?  Should they be
registered in `package--builtins´, and how?  Should they be part of the
main release tarball, or released separately?  And so on.

Mostly, we need an interested volunteer to step up and do the work.
This would probably start with reviewing past discussions to find out
what problems they uncovered.  Then propose, in practical terms, how we
could solve them.

So help is both welcome and needed here, I think.