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.