Re: Auto-installing packages?

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA> writes:

> Every time I see someone asking for or posting a little Elisp snippet
> that automatically installs packages at Emacs startup, I'm wondering how
> to answer that need: OT1H I find such requests fundamentally flawed in
> terms of security, privacy, and reliability, but OTOH they correspond to
> a real desire and lots of our users seem to not only be willing to
> forego their security, privacy and reliability for that feature, but
> they actually do so.
>
> So, I'm wondering how we could better serve our users by providing them
> with an alternative solution to their underlying need, which hopefully
> suffers less from those problems.
>
> Maybe some way to have something along the line of autoloads but that
> instead of loading the Elisp code from a locally installed package, they
> prompt the user explaining that this functionality requires installing
> package FOO, etc?


I use `use-package' to "automatically" install packages for me. I use
several machines and sync my configuration between them. The packages I
want get auto-installed this way. Also, when I update Emacs, I
re-install all my packages.

The auto-installing, autoload would be nice. It would answer the
long-standing desire to incorporate ELPA packages more deeply into
Emacs. However, to make it work well, I think, ELPA needs updating to
support multiple versions of packages for multiple versions of Emacs.

Phil