Re: Core ELPA was: Testing fontification, indentation, and buffer manipulation

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > That's not the case here. The idea is this. You (the user) manually
  > clones the Emacs repository. When you build it (by default) the Emacs
  > build process automatically clones the ELPA reposistory and takes the
  > files that it needs from there.

That avoids the problem I thought I saw, but what is the purpose?  I
thought the idea of ELPA is that a user would get ELPA packages when perse
wants them -- they would not be preloaded.

If installing Emacs doesn't require a local copy of ELPA, building
Emacs should not need one.

Is this a way of handling a few packages that are included in Emacs
distros, if we maintain them in ELPA?  It makes a kind of sense for
that case, but I would expect that those testing and making Emacs
releases would need more control over which versions of packages are
included in the release.

  > My build process simply runs git fetch when it thinks it needs to. Where
  > the fetch will come from (if anywhere) can be configured where the
  > developer wants. So, it's still possible to isolate yourself totally
  > from the main ELPA repo.

It is one more thing that could trip people up, those who are not used
to it.  They would forget to do this and the build would surprise them.

In my case, I might fetch master from the Emacs repo, then build the
next day while having no network connection.  So it would fail.

For all these reasons, it would be better to copy these programs
into the Emacs repo, and just not edit them there -- only update
from the ELPA repo when appropriate.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)