Re: Tramp as ELPA package

[Michael Albinus]

Michael Albinus <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Stefan,

> Further problems for making Tramp an ELPA package:
>
> * Revised version structure. Tramp is released roughly every 6 months
>   (releases 2.4.0, 2.4.1, ...). In the time between, it has an
>   intermediate release string like 2.4.1-pre. At least for the *-pre
>   version, Tramp changes frequently, w/o a new version. This does not
>   work well for ELPA packages.
>
>   Maybe we need an intermediate release string as the MELPA packages
>   have: add a time stamp in the Version: header of tramp.el *only* in
>   the Emacs repository, whenever a new version of Tramp shall appear as
>   package, like 2.4.1.pre.20180826. This shouldn't be done
>   automatically, by intention only. An automatic release of Tramp as
>   ELPA package might be too frequent, I fear.
>
> * Several Tramp versions. I maintain several Tramp versions in parallel,
>   currently 2.3.4 and 2.4.1. I'm not confident that 2.4.1 shall be the
>   ELPA package today, because new features will be added here, and it is
>   kind of unstable, therefore. I believe, 2.3.4 would be better suited
>   for all users *not* running Emacs 27.0.50. Users running Emacs 27.0.50
>   do not need Tramp as ELPA package, because it is always synced with
>   the Emacs repository. How do we manage this?
>
> * Providing Tramp documentation. IIUC, ELPA packages could contain
>   *.texi and *.info files, but they are not propagated to the
>   users. This shall be enhanced, because new features of Tramp are
>   reflected there.
>
> * Likely more problems ...

I'm coming back to this old thread, since there is still no Tramp ELPA
package. We have bug#32544, but this is also stalled.

Would it be possible to go the same line as org-mode has done? There is
nothing org-mode related in the GNU ELPA repository, but regularly
snapshots of org-mode are published as tar-files for ELPA. In
GNUmakefile of the ELPA repository, there is a target org-fetch which is
used to get this file, und bring it into the archive. Based on this,
org-mode releases are announced for GNU ELPA, like org-mode 9.2.3
recently.

I could imagine, that I'll upload a similar file to the Tramp ftp
archive every time a new Tramp version has been published. It could have
the name tramp-<version>-elpa.tar, and it would contain everything an
ELPA archive file needs. After fetching, this could be offered as GNU
ELPA package then.

What do yo think?

>>         Stefan

Best regards, Michael.