Re: Emacs Package Management

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Stefan> In order to move forward on this thing, here's what I'd like to
Stefan> have as a first step: the equivalent of `dpkg', i.e. an elisp
Stefan> package that can take a package (a tarball, most likely) and
Stefan> "install it", list the set of installed packages, uninstall
Stefan> a package.

> I was thinking more about integrating package.el and I remembered one
> problem.

> Right now, package.el byte-compiles at install time.  However, this
> yields incorrect results if the .elc format changes incompatibly, and
> the user upgrades Emacs.  I believe this has happened in the past.

We normally try to preserve forward compatibility, so old .elcs should
work fine.  IOW, the problem can only show up if the user byte-compiles
with the new Emacs and then uses the file with an older Emacs.
If that's the problem, then I wouldn't worry about it (after all, the
same happens already for the normal manual installation procedure or
external packages).

> We discussed a solution to this long ago: putting the .elc files into a
> shadow directory hierarchy.  Is this still a good idea?

If possible, I'd rather avoid the complexity.


        Stefan