Re: package.el, auto-installation, and auto-removal

[Nic Ferrier <nferrier@ferrier.me.uk>]

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

>> I provided URLs to Pallet's repo on Github and to Nic's comparison of
>> Cask (which Pallet uses underneath) and elpakit (the comparison is on
>> the elpakit repo home page, also on Github).  I described how Pallet
>> currently works with advice and how it could be improved to use hooks.
>> Sorry if I didn't explain things better.  What's unclear?
>
> I guess I just don't understand what those things do, nor how they do
> it, and your explanations didn't really help.
>
> E.g. does one of those things make it so that M-x package-install will
> add the package to some list of "explicitly installed packages"?
> If so, which tool, and how does it do it?  AFAICT it can only do that
> via advice currently.  Of course, it can be changed to use hooks, but
> why bother, when we can just modify package-install directly?

Having thought about it that seems like the best thing. Just add another
property to the package somehow that says "the user installed this
directly". Maybe keep that along side the archive as well as in the
archive so that it can be mixed in when you refresh the indexes.

It would be nice to keep it as a directory structure because they are
easier to edit:

.emacs.d/elpa/
.emacs.d/elpa/archives/
.emacs.d/elpa/archives/marmalade/
.emacs.d/elpa/archives/gnu/
.emacs.d/elpa/archives/user-installed/
.emacs.d/elpa/archives/user-installed/elnode
.emacs.d/elpa/archives/user-installed/rcirc


Nic