[emacs-berlin] Reproducible Emacs installations

[jman]

Arne Brasseur writes:

> Straight uses melpa's recipes, but it does not actually install packages
> from MELPA, instead it gets them directly via git. The versions.el file
> contains the exact commit hash for each package, so when you use this
> config on a different computer you'll get the exact same
> code/commit/version for each package. True reproducibility!

Thank you Arne! Your suggestion is definitively an improvement over
mine, thank you also for taking the time to explain with code and
comments, really appreciated.
So far I never had problems with package versions so I was never burned by
this issue, but you have a great point about being truly reproducible.

One thing I'd like straight.el to implement is the ability to pin package
versions rather than git commits (which are opaque and don't tell me the
versioning of a package therefore I don't have hints about possible
breaking changes). But it looks like this feature is on the maintainer's
radar and that there is a workaround [0] to make it work with tagged release.

I also really appreciated they now (since April 2020) straight.el supports
shallow
git clones [1], this saves *a lot* of bandwidth!

regards,

[0]
https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el/#how-do-i-pin-package-versions-or-use-only-tagged-releases
[1] https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el/#april-19-2020