Re: Yum-like emacs package manager?

[Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>]

On 2015-02-18T04:33:50+1100, Anssi Saari said:

 AS> I haven't had problems with that but then I have very little 
 AS> experience with package.el. Last week I installed org-ehtml 
 from
 AS> melpa but the installation failed because org-mode was too 
 old
 AS> (this was on an otherwise pristine 24.4 installation.) Easily
 AS> fixed by updating org first but it seems there's no 
 dependency
 AS> handling which seems really rather odd.

There is at least some dependency handling[1], but Org as a 
dependency is a bit trickier than others, as it's a package which 
is under heavy development outside of Emacs core - and many Org 
users follow the bleeding edge - but the version of it bundled 
with Emacs is merely a 'snapshot' of Org development at a 
particular point in the Emacs release cycle.

There have been a few discussions recently on the emacs-devel 
list:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/

about improving the Emacs package system, e.g.:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00967.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00632.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00367.html


Alexis.

[1] E.g. consider the `ac-clang` package on MELPA. In 
`package-list-packages` view, pressing RET on the package name 
will show:

    Requires: emacs-24, cl-lib-0.5, auto-complete-1.4.0, 
    yasnippet-0.8.0

and trying to install it will (in my experience) pull in 
e.g. yasnippet if the latter isn't already installed.