Problems installing (M)ELPA packages

Problems installing (M)ELPA packages

[Sebastien Vauban]

Hello,

While using `package.el' fulfills a long-awaited dream for easily adding
and upgrading Emacs libraries, I now feel upgrading packages is much
more complex than what I anticipated.

At least two of the packages I use daily (Org and Helm) require to be
installed from inside a fresh Emacs session (emacs -Q), where nothing
has been loaded.

For example, the FAQ entry from Helm on this:

  ╭──── https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/wiki#ihaveupdatedfrommelpaandihaveerrors
  │
  │ I have updated from melpa and I have errors
  │
  │   - Uninstall helm from list-packages
  │   - Close emacs
  │   - Start emacs -Q
  │   - Reinstall helm from list-packages
  │   - Restart emacs
  ╰────

I guess a lot of people are not aware of this, and don't take enough
look at the Compile log to see that it can lead to (big?) problems.

Is that something that could/will be fixed in the future?

Is the Helm workaround (with Emacs-async, documented in the above link)
usable for avoiding this with all ELPA packages?

Best regards,
  Seb

-- 
Sebastien Vauban

Re: Problems installing (M)ELPA packages

[Stefan Monnier]

>   ╭──── https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/wiki#ihaveupdatedfrommelpaandihaveerrors
>   │
>   │ I have updated from melpa and I have errors
>   │
>   │   - Uninstall helm from list-packages
>   │   - Close emacs
>   │   - Start emacs -Q
>   │   - Reinstall helm from list-packages
>   │   - Restart emacs
>   ╰────

Uninstalling should not be needed above.

> Is that something that could/will be fixed in the future?

There have been some discussions about it in emacs-devel, but nothing
concrete came out of it yet (except maybe emacs-async, tho IIUC it
existed before).

I suggest you re-start a discussion about this in emacs-devel or via
M-x report-emacs-bug.

For this discussion, it would be helpful to have a list of known
breakages with some analysis of why they break.  I know of one source of
problems:
When compiling the new package, (require 'foo) will do nothing if the
old package also had a `foo' which is already loaded, in which case we
end up using the old package's `foo' to compile the new package, which
of course leads to various problems, e.g. if we use some macros from `foo'.


        Stefan

Re: Problems installing (M)ELPA packages

[Michael Heerdegen]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> For this discussion, it would be helpful to have a list of known
> breakages with some analysis of why they break.  I know of one source of
> problems:
> When compiling the new package, (require 'foo) will do nothing if the
> old package also had a `foo' which is already loaded, in which case we
> end up using the old package's `foo' to compile the new package, which
> of course leads to various problems, e.g. if we use some macros from `foo'.

For helm, that is exactly the problem (and the only one I know of).
Currently, the maintainers are flooded with breakage reports due to
macro changes.

AFAICT, it is planned to enhance async so that it can perform
compilation of packages (and to use an advice to make package.el use
it.).  For helm, it is planned to let the helm package depend on
emacs-async, which should solve the problem - see
https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/issues/617.

Michael.