Well the argument about MELPA is a bit misplaced, as there's also MELPA Stable. I mean snapshots are not a bad idea if you know what you're doing (I'm using MELPA myself), but most packages still have "stable" releases. I can't think of a single package that I use that doesn't get tagged releases from time to time. 

I was also under the impression that there are already ELPA and NonGNU devel repositories that behave like MELPA, so I'm not sure what would we be solving then. 

> Every patch is probably a feature or a bug-fix to some aspect of the package. As a user, I want those as soon as they are
> available.

Often that's not the case - patches can be improvements to docs, build infrastructure, small steps towards some new features, etc. 

> Not having to version things manually is a god-send.

It saves a tiny bit of time for the maintainers and makes life a bit harder for the end users IMO. Anyways, perspective on this subject will always vary. For me updating a couple of version numbers in a package is an insignificant amount of work (and it's work that's trivial to automate). 

On Mon, Oct 24, 2022, at 9:45 AM, Jostein Kjønigsen wrote:
> On 24.10.2022 08:14, Bozhidar Batsov wrote:
>> The patch seems fine to me, but I'm a bit skeptical about the whole rolling releases idea in general
> This is the default operation for MELPA, which arguably has more popular packages than ELPA.
> 
> It works fine.
> 
>> should something like a change to the docs really result in a new release?
> Yes. Unconditionally.
> 
> Every patch is probably a feature or a bug-fix to some aspect of the package. As a user, I want those as soon as they are available.
> 
>> How hard it is for people to actually update version timestamps themselves or to just stick to the *-devel repos if they don't want to cut releases?
> As a package-developer, I may release patches weekly, but I update main versions maybe once every second year, if/when someone bothers me about it.
> 
> Not having to version things manually is a god-send.
> 
>> 
>> How much was the demand for something like this in general? I can't think of any major Emacs package that does rolling releases.
> All of them does, if they're on MELPA. That's what MELPA does.
> 
> --
> 
> Jostein
>