Subject: Re: bug#48342: native-comp emacs gets into an infinite loop at startup if no .el files are available

From: Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2021 18:57:32 +0000

>> That's a problematic interpretation of the GPL, IME: this way, how can 
>> the user be sure he/she will be able to obtain at a later date the 
>> sources of the exact binary he/she is running?  And the same question 
>> for Lisp files and the corresponding *.elc/*.eln.  The only way to make 
>> sure is to have them together.
>
> Debian (an every other distro I'm guessing) has been doing it like this 
> for a really long time. Everything is versioned. When the distributor 
> makes packages, they build and ship all the packages together: sources, 
> binaries, .el, .elc, and so on.
>
> When a user installs the packages at a later time, they don't have to 
> download and install the whole set. A user installs "emacs" version 
> "abc". The version string includes the upstream version that select a 
> specific emacs release AND the packaging version. At any later point in 
> time the user can install "emacs-el" version "abc" or get the sources 
> for emacs, again at version "abc". The identical version numbers 
> guarantee that they're downloading packages the distributor built at the 
> same time as the "emacs" package the user has already. It works.
>

I think that doesn't completely answer Eli's question: "how can the user 
be sure he/she will be able to obtain at a later date the sources of the 
exact binary he/she is running?"

Debian at least maintains a separate repository (snapshot.debian.org) in 
which you can find each version of each package distributed by Debian 
after March 2005, in both source and binary form.  Yes, that's quite a lot 
of data: that archive currently occupies ~100 TB.