Re: Installation from ELPA

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > > Does installation of a package from ELPA normally load only
  > > the binary?

  > What do you mean by "binary" in this context?  We are talking about
  > Lisp programs, so there should be no "binaries" in the usual sense of
  > this word.

In general, "binaries" in the context of discussions of source code
means any transformed files made from source code, which are not
themselves source code.

It would have been more precise and rigorous to write "non-source
files", but I don't think it would actually be clearer.

The non-source files generated from Emacs Lisp code are truly
binaries.  Byte-compiled files represent compiled functions using
strings of binary data that contain the byte codes.  There are also
native-compiled files, which contain binary code for machine
instructions.

This question is pertinent to the issue of what ways of
fetching a package from ELPA would be useful to have.
So I hope someone will post the answer.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)