Re: Proposal for 'package-isolate' command

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>
> Cc: thievol@posteo.net,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2023 19:52:32 +0000
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Seems strange to me to have a command to start another Emacs.  Why not
> > implement this as a command-line option instead?  That would be
> > consistent with the several options we already have, like -q, -Q, -D,
> > which already contrl what happens at startup.
> 
> Mainly because this wouldn't support a completing-read interface, that
> simplifies prompting the user for a set of packages.

Shells can complete as well, right?  And once you typed the command
once, shells have features to help you invoke commands from history,
so you won't need to retype it more than once.

> But perhaps the bulk of this command could be implemented as a CLI
> option, that this command could wrap?

Maybe.  But again, it's strange to have to launch another process from
Emacs for such a simple functionality.  And if the number of packages
to load is large, typing them manually would be annoying anyway, so
people will probably store the list in a file or something?  So maybe
we should allow specifying a file with the list of packages as well?

> >> +          (make-symbolic-link real link t)
> >
> > Using symbolic links makes the program less portable, so it is best to
> > avoid them.
> 
> The reason I used them here, instead of just adding the directories
> under ~/.config/emacs/elpa/ is that startup.el issues a warning along
> the lines of
> 
>   Your `load-path' seems to contain your `user-emacs-directory' ...
> 
> My previous patch actually included the code that suppresses all
> warnings during initialisation, so I've removed this hack.

I don't understand how this is different from a "normal" startup of
Emacs with all the packages.  Here, you just want to load part of the
packages that are loaded normally, so why does this warning pop up in
this case, but not when Emacs starts "normally"?  I'm probably missing
something.