Re: Best (or common) pratices on package development workflow

[Ruijie Yu]

On Jun 2, 2023, at 07:12, Lic. Federico G. Stilman <fstilman@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> First things first. I started development with Emacs Lisp a few weeks
> ago after using for more than 20 years Emacs for my daily work. So I
> am a newbie on the Emacs Lisp development side.
> 
> I am currently writing a simple Emacs package consisting of one .el file.
> 
> I have a couple of defcustom declarations that initialize some
> variables with a default value. And this is the source of my question.
> 
> Every time I make a change to the init value of the defcustom
> declaration, I have to unload the feature provided by the package,
> with something like:
> 
>  (unload-feature 'my-package)

for defcustom, defun, defvar, etc, you can use C-M-x when you are inside the 
corresponding s-exp to evaluate it (and reset the initial value if it is a 
variable).  See the docstring of C-M-x for details. 

When for some reason I don’t feel like doing that, I would use either 
makunbound or fmakunbound to clear its symbol value or symbol function, then 
load the file again via M-x eval-buffer or the like. 

> and after that, reload the library with something like
> 
>  (load-library "my-package")
> 
> If not, the customization framework doesn't account for the change on
> the default value of the custom variables.
> 
> My question is: which is the workflow you use when developing a
> package for Emacs, for easily "reloading" the package for any kind of
> changes by taken into account?
> 
> Re-evaluating the entire, or loading the file, works for reloading
> functions. But - as far as I know - does not work for reloading
> defcustom initialization values.
> 
> My package is for now something very simple consisting of one .el
> file. I wonder how do you manage this when a package consists of many
> .el files.
> 
> Thank you all,
> 
> Federico
>