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

From: Mauricio Collares <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 16:46:42 -0300

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

I would like to ask the GNU ELPA maintainers to host both
https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/PACKAGE-CURRENTVERSION.lz (permanent) as
well as https://elpa.gnu.org/packagesa/PACKAGE-CURRENTVERSION
(temporary). This would make it easier for people to build reproducible
environments by pinning a package version. I don't particularly care
about exposing it as a link on the website; for my purposes, it's enough
that the file exists. This is perhaps a little bit wasteful, but
compressed versions shouldn't be too big.

Best,
Mauricio