GNU Developer ELPA support

[mohkale]

Looks like there's a new ELPA variant for in-development packages. I can't seem to find any recipe repo for it 😢, would it be possible for straight to support this similar to the builtin ELPA. https://elpa.gnu.org/devel/index.html

[raxod502]

I see, so GNU-devel ELPA is to GNU ELPA like MELPA is to MELPA Stable.

I think this is actually already what you get from the gnu-elpa-mirror recipe repo in straight.el, since as you may know straight.el does not have any built-in support for package version numbers or tagged releases.

Are there any packages or versions of packages in this new repo that are not already available in gnu-elpa-mirror?

[mohkale]

That's interesting 🤔.

Currently I have disabled straight-recipes-gnu-elpa-use-mirror and peridically fetch and manually unpack newer commits for packages I depend on. I noticed recently a commit on eglot which is syncing it with an upstream and in Eglots README it references ELPA-devel so I thought eglot has more immediate changes committed to ELPA-devel and I'm pulling them in from ELPA so I'm receiving them on a delayed schedule.

Perhaps worth clarifying. @joaotavora what is meant by upstream in the context of this commit?

[raxod502]

peridically fetch and manually unpack newer commits for packages I depend on

As in download tarballs from the public-facing GNU ELPA package archive, rather than doing anything with Git? If so, then yes, you would be getting only release versions, and you would benefit from using GNU-devel ELPA. But I don't think any changes are needed to straight.el; your entire workflow is outside of the scope of straight.el because you're downloading and managing those packages manually.

[mohkale]

Apologies for the delay, I was on holiday 🥳.

As in download tarballs from the public-facing GNU ELPA package archive

To be clear this is not my current workflow. What I do atm is:

1. Run M-x straight-fetch-package-and-deps
2. Cd to where/my/straight/repos/directory/is.
3. find -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read -r it; do sh -c 'cd "$1"; echo "$(pwd)"; git status' -- "$it"; done | less
4. For each repo with new commits I use M-x find-library with embark to open a magit buffer in that project and then just confirm what new changes have been added.
5. Merge changes from all projects then run M-x straight-rebuild-all to refresh my state.
6. Use it briefly and then freeze my versions and commit any changes to my lockfile into vc.

At some point it would be nice to automate the shell command into magit directly from Emacs but not a priority at this stage.

[raxod502]

Yea so I don't think there is any difference from what you get doing that and what you would get using package.el with GNU-devel ELPA.