How do you develop emacs core packages?

How do you develop emacs core packages?

[Ackerley Tng]

Hi Emacs Developers!

Would like to learn your workflow while developing core packages.

I use the package manager's version of emacs, so I have a lot of
.el.gz files in some system directory.

If I want to develop on one of those, I usually make a copy of the
entire file, and then iterate by evaluating the function in emacs to
override existing definitions, but sometimes when global variables
initialized on emacs startup need to be adjusted, I find it hard to
undo those steps, which the default package sets up.

What's your workflow for developing core packages, do you have any
tricks to share?

Re: How do you develop emacs core packages?

[Philip Kaludercic]

Ackerley Tng <ackerleytng@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Emacs Developers!
>
> Would like to learn your workflow while developing core packages.
>
> I use the package manager's version of emacs, so I have a lot of
> .el.gz files in some system directory.
>
> If I want to develop on one of those, I usually make a copy of the
> entire file, and then iterate by evaluating the function in emacs to
> override existing definitions, but sometimes when global variables
> initialized on emacs startup need to be adjusted, I find it hard to
> undo those steps, which the default package sets up.
>
> What's your workflow for developing core packages, do you have any
> tricks to share?

The main thing would be to build Emacs from source, then you always have
the newest versions of any file you wish to work on (which will prevent
issues when applying patches), and if you clone the emacs.git
repository, you'll be able to prepare git patches and see the version
history.

This might be of use: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/CONTRIBUTE