Re: Keeping an ELPA checkout

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:52:02 -0400 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote: 

SM> I've been trying to use a checkout of ELPA with my "always run in-place"
SM> development of Emacs, and I see some difficulties:

SM> I want to just do "bzr update; make" and have all the ELPA packages
SM> be updated, byte-compiled, ready for use, and ready for edit
SM> (i.e. C-h f gives me a link to the file under Bzr).  As is the case
SM> for all the files in emacs/lisp.

But ELPA packages are... packages!  Everything in emacs/lisp is source
code, meant to work as you describe.  Some ELPA packages happen to be
single-file libraries but you are trying to skip the installation and
activation steps which track dependencies, byte-compile, and adjust the
load path.  At least I don't think that's how it is supposed to work in
Tom Tromey's design.

I think these package.el features may be useful:

revno: 103553
committer: Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>
message:
  Allow specifying local ELPA mirrors in package-archives.

revno: 103229
author: Phil Hagelberg <phil@hagelb.org>
committer: Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>
message:
  Allow packages to be reinstalled.

Which I think are so people can install ELPA locally, edit things
locally, and reinstall the package when ready.  Does that help?  It can
probably be automated to be part of a "make local-activate-all" process.

Or do you just want to use the ELPA packages without the ELPA wrappings?

Ted