Re: Emacs Package Management

[Tom Tromey]

Stefan> In order to move forward on this thing, here's what I'd like to have as
Stefan> a first step: the equivalent of `dpkg', i.e. an elisp package that can
Stefan> take a package (a tarball, most likely) and "install it", list the set
Stefan> of installed packages, uninstall a package.

package.el does all of these...

Stefan> An important feature for me is that this should be able to "install
Stefan> without making available"

... but not this.

Stefan> So basically, the installation process would distinguish the following
Stefan> steps:
Stefan> - install: may include byte-compiling and things like that
Stefan> - activate: eval the autoload declarations, adjust the load-path, ...
Stefan> - make available: setup the .emacs so that the package gets activated
Stefan>   at startup.

package.el does this.

Stefan> Activation should be done by loading a single file.  I.e. "make
Stefan> available" is nothing more than add a (load "/foo/bar/baz") in the
Stefan> .emacs.

It does this too, though only a single (package-initialize) is needed --
package.el handles activating all the packages that can be activated.

Stefan> This "dpkg"-equivalent may also want to do dependency checking, although
Stefan> this is not absolutely necessary for the first step.

Also done.

Also, package.el sets the info path when a package ships a dir file.

Tom