Phil Hagelberg <phil@hagelb.org> writes:

>> Basically, all I want is for it to be able to distinguish between
>> "packages available locally, either installed by the user or the
>> sysadmin", and "packages that will be autoloaded in a given session", so
>> as to be able to install different versions of the same package at the
>> same time.
>
> OK, I will prioritize this once I finish adding support for multiple
> archive sources. I think we'll need this in order to support separating
> out fully-supported packages vs unsupported packages for which we simply
> have copyright assignment as Ted has suggested.

I've just implemented support for multiple package sources in
package.el. Right now it is preconfigured to use ELPA, but the following
snippet will let it pull in packages from my own archive source as well:

(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("technomancy" . "http://repo.technomancy.us/emacs/") t)

Hit M-x package-list-packages to see all available packages. The "bork"
and "bingle" packages are dummies that are only available from my
repository, and should be available for installation at the same time as
the standard ELPA-provided packages.

I'd love to see some other elisp library authors try to set up their own
package archive sources using package-maint.el and test the
multiple-archive support.

I hope that a new version of package.el incorporating my changes could
be pushed out to ELPA and then possibly included in Emacs once a little
more work has gone into integration with the Emacs load process.

-Phil