Re: [elpa] main 8f4cb59: * elpa-packages (counsel, ivy, swiper): Auto-sync.

[Stefan Monnier]

> I've now bumped all the swiper.git versions to 0.13.3, and merged the
> upstream changes into the five corresponding branches in elpa.git.
>
> The elpa-admin release detection doesn't seem happy with it though:

Indeed.  It would want first merging and then updating the `Version:` line.

> The following seems to fix the revision detection locally:

[...]

> @@ -170,7 +170,7 @@ elpaa--get-release-revision
>                       (elpaa--call
>                        (current-buffer)
>                        "git" "log" "-n1" "--oneline" "--no-patch"
> -                      "--pretty=format:%H"
> +                      "--pretty=format:%H" "--first-parent"
>                        "-L" (concat "/^;;* *\\(Package-\\)\\?Version:/,+1:"
>                                     (elpaa--main-file pkg-spec))))
>                      (buffer-string)

[...]

> It seems to work with ivy and ivy-avy, which introduce releases via
> merge commits, as well as dash, which doesn't.  WDYT?

The problem is that which parent is "first" is very much arbitrary in
Git (contrary to Bzr where this was made much more visible), so this is
just a heuristic that will fail in other cases.

> Is there a better/different way?  The only alternative I can think of is
> to enter revisions manually in the :version-map, but that doesn't seem
> desirable in the long run.

There are many different ways, some of which are likely better in some
respects, but I'm not sure which is the better one overall.

Suggestions:

- change the versions after merging rather than before (as mentioned
  above).  It's an easy low-tech solution, but it involves N times more
  work if a single .git upstream version leads to N downstream releases.

- if there's really only one version number shared by all the
  sub-packages, I'd tend to argue that maybe there should only be one
  package ;-)

- as discussed earlier, we could have each subpackage have the complete
  upstream Git and only create the subpackages via `elpa-package`
  filtering out the other files.

- split the upstream repository.

- add some other way than :version-map to specify which commit to use.
  This could be a new :version-first-parent boolean option, or maybe
  a "don't look for commit in history" (after all, that's what the old
  GNU ELPA script used to do: it used whichever commit was
  HEAD when we discovered that the `Version:` "had changed" (meaning
  the version in HEAD corresponds to not-yet-built file)).

> P.S. Sorry if this breaks anything on elpa.gnu.org :(.

I haven't noticed any problem so far.


        Stefan