Re: question about recent change

[Stefan Monnier]

Artur> Do you think these external packages should instead be
Artur> automatically marked for upgrade?  I think it makes sense for
Artur> them to be treated the same as built-in packages.
> I tend to think that any sort of package should be available for
> upgrade.

As explained, they are.

> If it is available externally as well, then it presumably has its own
> releases and users might reasonably want to know that.

I have a feeling you're misunderstanding "external".  All it means is
that these packages have been installed elsewhere.  Two typical
scenarios:
- those "external" packages are actually installed system-wide by the
  sysadmin (or by dpkg, tho IIUC Debian's packaging does make use of
  this (yet)).  They're plain normal ELPA packages, probably installed
  using package.el as well, but by another user and into
  a special directory.  And the user can expect that the sysadmin will
  be in charge of keeping them up-to-date.
- those external packages are the elpa/packages subdirectories.  So they
  also correspond to packages available in ELPA.  And here again, the
  expectation is that those packages will be updated "some other way"
  (e.g. by "git pull").

I think the important message is that the normal "update all" command
should only be used to *replace* packages.  It's important that we
support installing a second version of a package without removing the
older version, but this should be a special use-case which only happens
by explicit request from the user.


        Stefan