Why is Emacs Lisp framework updates taking so long to reach -unstable?

EDIT: correct the number of Emacs lisp packages

My bad. It is probably better to merge your PR into master first.

That being said, you only have to rebase once after the next staging cycle finishes.

It seems the bottle-neck of rebuilding 6k (24k for four platforms) small Emacs lisp packages is compression (probably xz -9). This can be improved if cache.nixos.org switches to a faster compressor.

Related:

Looks like zstd is ready for cache.nixos.org now.

Due to the large number of Emacs lisp packages (6k), another factor contributing to long build time might be network latency of remote build.