Re: Easy configuration of a site-lisp directory

[Arthur Miller]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:
>>
>>> Just wanted to ping this message to check if there is any interest in
>>> doing something with my initial suggestion?
>>
>> I do something similar as you do, but I use it only for some loose
>> files I write myself, and for some I download from emacs wiki etc.
>>
>>>> The fundamental idea is to have an easy-to-use ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/
>>>> directory where a user can clone any repository or create their own,
>>>> without having to manually add these to load-path, generate autoloads or
>>>> byte compile.
>>
>> I have a question: is it desirable to use a working git directory as
>> installed package? When I write my own files, I usually don't wish to
>> copy them over to my "lisp" directory which I autoload in Emacs, untill
>> I am done. Admittedly I started doing so before git has entered the
>> scene. Now I guess one can switch branches every time one works on a package
>> between some development branch and some stable, but isn't it a bit tedious?
>>
>> What you are suggesting is to effectively use "site-lisp" as another
>> package-user-dir (~/.emacs.d/elpa on my machine). You are also auto
>> recursing in all dirs, so if user wish to remove something they have to
>> remove that directory from the path?
>>
>> Why not hack pacakge.el to use "local archives", would work something like 
>> this:
>>
>> (add-to-list 'package-archives '("site-lisp" . 
>> "file://path/to/my/site-lisp"))
>>
>> Or maybe we can skip 'file://', and just use path, say like this:
>>
>> (add-to-list 'package-archives '("local" . "~/.emacs.d/lisp"))
>>
>> Package.el would need to be hacked to install a package either from
>> a single file, which it can already do, or from a directory, which would
>> need to be added. That would also work out of th ebox with
>> package-quickstart.el generation.
>>
>> The only bigger work there would be to make package.el install
>> directories.
>>
>> Alternatively, package.el could treat local directories slightly
>> differently and just add their paths to load-path and generates
>> autoloads, but that complicates package.el slightly more which maybe is
>> unnecessary.
>
> I just looked at package.el and realized that it is already possible to
> install directories, I wasn't aware of that fact. So the only extra work
> is to make it recognize local paths in a list package-archives list, in
> principle.
 And  I also realized that package-archives can already deal with local
 directories. So everything is there.

Users can already install from local repos.