Re: Are there an elisp package manager like apt-get or cpan?

[Þorne <ego111@gmail.com>]

chylli wrote:
> Hi. Are there an emacs lisp package manager like apt-get in debian or
> cpan in perl ? When I want to install a package, I just run a command,
> then emacs will find proper package in proper web site and install
> it.

Funny, i was just thinking of writing one the other day.  I got to
thinking that it would really be trivial to write something using
ange-ftp or tramp or whatever.  Something like asdf-install for Emacs.

You could have a function like `esdf-load' that goes and looks up a
keyword in a known flat-file database on the net consisting of (KEYWORD
. location) pairs, then grab the source from the location and load it.
`esdf-find-file' could do the same but just open it in a buffer.  And
`esdf-install' could grab it, save it to `esdf-install-directory' and
add (load "foo") to your .emacs (or something a little better).

And it could be called recursively.  So developers who have packages
using more than one file could have a package definition file that is
what esdf-install would point to, and that file would just have calls
to esdf-install for all the files in the package, in whatever order was
desired.

But the thing is, it is so easy to do this already if you know the
location of the file that it is hardly necessary.  So the real problem
is finding someone who wants to keep a database online of such
information, or even wants to archive the packages themselves as actual
downloadable, loadable .el files, rather that links to text in html
files and Usenet postings and such.  There is the Emacs Lisp List, and
the emacswiki, but the the data tends not to be consistently in the
form of clean .el files.

For whateven all that may be worth...

th