Re: development practices for ELPA packages

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net> writes:

> Hello,

Hi,

> I currently have Emms and rt-liberation in ELPA. Users of those packages
> are happy with this. However, as a developer I'm less happy. I would
> like to ask for help in learning how people with packages in ELPA
> develop them.
>
> Right now I'm working on the next release of rt-liberation. I would like
> to tell Emacs: "load all of the ELPA packages normally, but when you get
> to rt-liberation please load my local, non-packaged, version from
> /devel/rt-liberation"
>
> I know I can give the package manager a list of packages to load, but
> that doesn't help me. I want to tell the package manage which package
> _not_ to load, and what to load instead.
>
> How do people who work on ELPA packages manage this?

I would call "make archive" on the top level of the ELPA directory. And
then I would declare a local ELPA archive with higher priority, like

(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("local" . "/home/albinus/src/elpa/archive/packages/"))

(add-to-list 'package-archive-priorities
	     '("local" . 3))
(add-to-list 'package-archive-priorities
	     '("gnu" . 2))
(add-to-list 'package-archive-priorities
	     '("melpa" . 1))

> Thank you in advance.

Best regards, Michael.