Re: What exactly does "installing a package" mean?

[Kevin W. van Rooijen <kevin.van.rooijen@attichacker.com>]

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Hi Marcin,

Installing a package /usually/ refers to installing a package through
the Emacs built in package manager.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InstallingPackages

These packages get installed in the 'package-user-dir', you yourself
should not have to manually modify any contents in that directory.
If you want to try and clean up your package management I suggest
taking a look at
use-package https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package
and Melpa https://github.com/milkypostman/melpa

Installing a package manually would mean adding the path to your package
to our load-path, and then require it manually. Though looking into
Emacs' built-in package manager is worth the effort.

So instead of removing them from your package-user-dir manually, try adding the
packages you need through use-package and let your Emacs configurations
handle it for you.

Marcin Borkowski writes:

> Hi all,
>
> do I get it correctly that "installing a package" means that Emacs
> creates a certain subdirectory of `package-user-dir' and puts the
> relevant file(s) there - and that's it?
>
> In particular, is deleting a subdirectory of `package-user-dir' enough
> to uninstall the package?  Is moving its subdirectory somewhere else,
> restarting Emacs, then copying it back again and restarting again
> equivalent to uninstalling and then installing again?
>
> The reason I'm asking is that I'd like to get rid of the mess I managed
> to introduce in `package-user-dir', but OTOH this mess is working, and
> I don't want to break something accidentally, or rather, I want to have
> a simple way to rollback any changes.
>
> TIA,


- --

Kevin W. van Rooijen
@attichacker
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