Current ELPA stuff is super-risky, because only recent version is held in tar format. When new version released, previous one is converted to tar.gz, thus needs to be repackaged. No need to be maintainer to understand, how hopeless would be to try handle all cases manually. This needs continuous integration on top of elpa overlay git hostings, runing periodically following loop for detected elpa tar packages: - check current url for availability on success: - check modification date / checksums (I'm not sure, what they do, that checksums break for existing filenames) on mismatch: mask pkg, notify maint; - next pkg / slot; on failure: - append ".gz" (or whatevery they use) and check again. - on failure: notify maintainer (no idea, what yet hooks could do) - replace url in ebuild, increasing its revision, update manifest - better compare archive contents too for unchanged names
As the overlays only contain the most recent version of each package the archiving with .gz should not cause any trouble (or more precisely only transient trouble until the next refresh). Do you have an example of changing checksums? That would increase the effort for maintaining the overlays quite a lot as this would mean fetching all of the dist files again and again if I interpret this correctly.
