Re: Bug: (org-release) returns empty string on Elpa [ ( @ /home/pierre/.guix-profile/share/emacs/site-lisp/)]

[Kyle Meyer]

Pierre Langlois writes:

> Hello there!
>
> Since the latest update to 9.4.4, some of us in Guix have been
> experiencing issues with loading packages that depend on Org [0]. It
> seems the root of the problem is that (org-release) returns an empty
> string, you can see this manifesting in this email actually :-).
[...]
> We download the Org source code directly from ELPA [1], it would seemx
> the org-version.el wasn't correctly generated, right?

Thanks for reporting.

It looks like org-release is also an empty string for 9.4.3, while 9.4.2
looks okay:

  # https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/org-9.4.2.tar.lz
  # https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/org-9.4.3.tar.lz
  $ grep '(org-release' org-9.4.3/org-version.el
     (let ((org-release ""))
  $ grep '(org-release' org-9.4.2/org-version.el
     (let ((org-release "9.4.2")

In between those two releases, there seems to have been some
restructuring on ELPA's end, in particular ee03829f90 (Finalize the new
master branch, 2020-12-14).

Based on looking at Org's entry in the elpa-packages file

  ("org"
   :url "https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode";
   :lisp-dir "lisp"
   :release-branch "maint"
   :ignored-files ("etc/schema" "contrib" "mk" "testing" "lisp/org-install.el")
   :news "etc/ORG-NEWS"
   :shell-command "make autoloads info; mv doc/org org.info; mv doc/orgguide 
orgguide.info"
   :doc ("org.info" "orgguide.info")
   :auto-sync t)

my uneducated guess is that the make command is failing to generate the
version when executed from its elpa.git worktree because,
unsurprisingly, elpa.git doesn't (and shouldn't) pull in the Org repo's
tags.

Bastien and Stefan, does the above guess sound right?  Any thoughts on
how to address the issue?