Re: Customizable modes and package.el

[emacs18@gmail.com (Richard Y. Kim)]

I have been a long time emacs user, but I just joined emacs-devel list
for the first time (I think).

I wanted to respond to Stefan's email so I cut-and-pasted his comments
from
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-04/msg00864.html>
in order to respond.

> The following vars affect package-initialize and hence need to be set
> before package-initialize is run:
> - package-directory-list
> - package-pinned-packages
> - package-load-list
> 
> There might be others, but these seem like the most important ones.

I would add `package-user-dir' to Stefan's list which to me is the all
important one since it specifies the location of the installed packages.
I set it to either ~/elisp/24.5.50 or ~/elisp/25.0.50 (kind of confusing
due to too many 5's) depending on the value of `emacs-version'.

Isn't it dangerous to load files byte-compiled by one version of emacs
by another version of emacs due to potential incompatibilities caused by
change in byte-compile formats?  I was burned couple of times over the
years due to change in byte-compile file format.

I have *never* gotten used to using ~/.emacs.d for any purpose.  So the
thought of emacs, by default, using anything in that directory is highly
disturbing to me.  I have always set `user-emacs-directory' to something
like "~/elisp" plus many other variables so that all files generated by
emacs are housed under ~/elisp, not ~/.emacs.d.  Whatever files that may
be under ~/.emacs.d are by accident which resulted from some temporary
experimentation I did via "emacs -q" who knows how many years ago.

If emacs by default starts reading anything under ~/.emacs.d, then I
will probably deal with that by adding code to wipe out ~/.emacs.d
automatically or to do something like "chmod 0 ~/.emacs.d" to make it
not readable.