a filesystem-based package repository

a filesystem-based package repository

[Sam Halliday]

Dear all,

The company that I work for has a firewall in place that blocks access to GNU ELPA and MELPA. But even if the files were mirrored, it is forbidden to download any software (including .el files!). Believe it or not, this is an increasingly common position taken by most large companies.

Getting any software into the company involves going through a lengthy process of requesting individual files to be downloaded, security checked, legally checked (thankfully GPL is allowed for applications) and made available on an NFS drive.

There are quite a few Emacs users in the company (100+) and we'd be really interested in approximating ELPA as much as possible. However, the packages must live in the NFS drive under the following immutable structure, per file:

/nfs/emacs/<module name>/<module version>/<module-name>-<module-version>.(el|tar)


1. Is it possible to have a filesystem-based ELPA repository?
2. What structure must the filesystem have?
3. What additional (index / dependency tree) files must be made available and how can they be created?

If the answers to all of these questions are positive, it should be possible to write a script to copy the latest version of each module from the NFS into a temporary directory in the user's home directory and run all the necessary indexing steps. Although, if it was possible to do it without copying the files, that would be a bonus.


Best regards,
Sam

Re: a filesystem-based package repository

[Kaushal Modi]

Check out this answer by Rodney Price on emacs.SE:
http://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/17408/115

I was able to successfully setup a local Elpa in my company to share
my company-internal emacs packages using the detailed steps in that
solution. We have NFS system too but it does not matter as I host the
hosts on my company intranet webpage, which is accessible only when on
my company IP.

Re: a filesystem-based package repository

[Stefan Monnier]

> Getting any software into the company involves going through a lengthy
> process of requesting individual files to be downloaded, security checked,
> legally checked (thankfully GPL is allowed for applications) and made
> available on an NFS drive.

I assume that doesn't apply to the megabytes of Javascript code
routinely downloaded and executed when you use your web browser ;-)

> There are quite a few Emacs users in the company (100+) and we'd be really
> interested in approximating ELPA as much as possible. However, the packages
> must live in the NFS drive under the following immutable structure, per
> file:

> /nfs/emacs/<module-name>/<module-version>/<module-name>-<module-version>.(el|tar)

Note that there are 2 ways to do that:
- try to provide a directory that has the structure of an ELPA archive.
  Users can then add it to package-archives and install packages from it
  using M-x package-list and friends.
- try to provide "pre-installed" packages.  These could live in
  directories like

     /nfs/emacs/<module-name>

  and users can then "install" those by doing something like

     ln -s /nfs/emacs/<module-name> ~/.emacs.d/elpa/

  Updating those packages would be done centrally (which has its
  advantages and disadvantages, of course).


--Stefan