Subject: bug#53805: 27.2; NonGNU ELPA: helm does not install dependencies

From: Thierry Volpiatto <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2022 08:22:49 +0000

Stefan Monnier via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of
text editors" <[email-masked]> writes:

>> It seems to me that the core of the issue is that the ELPA build system
>> overrides the existing -pkg.el files, by trying to infer all the package
>> metadata from the main files (helm.el, helm-core.el).  If as in the case
>> of helm and helm-core these are empty, this leads to unexpected results.
>
> The best course of action is to fix the upstream.
> They simply shouldn't have any `<foo>-pkg.el` file.

I disagree, in the simple case of async package this didn't cause problems, but
here it does because we have two packages (helm-core+helm) coming from
the same git repo.

> We will generate the `<foo>-pkg.el` in any case because we include more
> information there than what the upstream will have put (e.g. we include
> the commit id from which the tarball is built),

So what is the problem? Just append the informations fetched from the
upstream *pkg.el files to the *pkg.el file you are usually building.
I guess it is what Melpa does more or less.

> and and modifying files that are under version control tends to lead
> to problems.

You are anyway creating a new *pkg.el file so why do you want to modify
the original *pkg.el files?

-- 
Thierry