NOTES ON THE EMACS PACKAGE ARCHIVE The GNU Emacs package archive, at elpa.gnu.org, is managed using a Git repository named "elpa", hosted on Savannah. To check it out: git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs/elpa cd elpa git remote set-url --push origin git+ssh://git.sv.gnu.org/srv/git/emacs/elpa [create task branch for edits, etc.] Changes to this branch propagate to elpa.gnu.org via a "deployment" script run daily. This script (which is kept in elpa/admin/update-archive.sh) generates the content visible at http://elpa.gnu.org/packages. A new package is released as soon as the "version number" of that package is changed. So you can use 'elpa' to work on a package without fear of releasing those changes prematurely. And once the code is ready, just bump the version number to make a new release of the package. It is easy to use the elpa branch to deploy a "local" copy of the package archive. For details, see the README file in the elpa branch.