Subject: bug#46441: GNU ELPA feature request: host .lz archives (as well as uncompressed) for current versions

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2021 13:10:01 -0500

>> Currently, there's no way to get a permanent link to a package version
>> that happens to be the current one.

FWIW, the situation is even worse because there's no way to get
a permanent link at all: while we do keep some old versions, we don't
keep them all.  Currently, the limit is set at 20, meaning that we keep
up to 20 old versions around per package, and once we hit that limit we
start pruning the old versions according to a heuristic that intends to
guess which versions are more important to keep.

So that makes me question your "upstream" need.

>> For example, auctex is currently at
>> version 13.0.4; today I can download it from
>> https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/auctex-13.0.4.tar, but this link will stop
>> working as soon as a new version of auctex is released and the old
>> version gets compressed. This makes it slightly annoying to pin a
>> particular version of an ELPA package by URL.

Could you expand a bit on why you need to keep references to old
versions, and why you decided to use URLs for that?
That will hopefully help us see what is the best course of action
from here.

        Stefan "not opposed to building the .lz eagerly"