Re: Keeping an ELPA checkout

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:21:59 -0400 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote: 

SM> I've been trying to use a checkout of ELPA with my "always run in-place"
SM> development of Emacs, and I see some difficulties:

Is that supported by ELPA/package.el?  I didn't think so...  

Are you trying to *use* the packages or *compile* them?  I can't figure
it out from your post.

SM> I currently basically add a symlink from emacs/lisp/packages to
SM> elpa/packages.
SM> But this is too crude:
SM> 1- some files fail to compile (e.g. because they require ome package we
SM>    don't distribute).
SM> 2- the automatic decision of what to include in load-path leads to
SM>    shadows such as "auctex-11.86/style/url.el" vs "url/url.el".
SM> I think we need to come up with a way to do the above but more robustly.

Shouldn't package.el, which knows how to manage the load path and the
dependencies, be used for this?  In the Commentary it mentions this
phase:

;; * Byte compile.  Currently this phase is done during install,
;;   but we may change this.

but there are many TODO items regarding byte-compilation.

Ted