Re: package.el should be preloaded

[Chong Yidong]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> This was briefly mentioned before
>
>> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-06/msg00634.html
>
>> But it is loaded in every normal startup, whether or not I have any
>> packages installed. Surely it is impossible to tell if I have any
>> packages to load without loading package.el to search for them; so I
>> don't see any reason not to preload it.
>
> I agree we should preload it.  But we should do it by splitting the part
> that need to be preloaded into package-hooks.el.

I looked into this, but it turns out that most of package.el would need
to be preloaded.  Instead, I tweaked the code startup.el to check more
aggressively for local package directories, so that package.el won't be
loaded if no packages are installed.