Re: Auto-installing packages?

[Phil Sainty]

On 2018-09-14 13:51, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Maybe some way to have something along the line of autoloads but that
> instead of loading the Elisp code from a locally installed package, 
> they
> prompt the user explaining that this functionality requires installing
> package FOO, etc?

On the one hand I quite like that idea, and my first thought is that if
Emacs by default knew about commands from GNU ELPA packages, then maybe
more authors would actually be inspired to put their packages into the
GNU ELPA package archive, which would be good.

On the other hand I see the significant caveat that most of the packages
in GNU ELPA are probably of no interest to any given user, and a large
quantity of autoload declarations for irrelevant things clogging up the
function namespace seems like it could very well be annoying.

(Arguably no different to most of the regular autoloads, but I think
that ELPA has the potential to become a *lot* larger.)

We could always include a user option to say whether or not the GNU ELPA
autoloads should be included in completions?  If that was non-nil by
default, new users get the benefits you're looking for, but people can
disable the behaviour if they wish.


-Phil