Re: Auto-installing packages?

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

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > > That is a valid point, in the case of GNU ELPA.
>   > >
>   > > But would that facility be limited to GNU ELPA?
>
>   > > Or would it also be used with other package archives
>   > > that are not part of Emacs?
>
> You responded
>
>   > Emacs already has the ability to do this, but it is up to the user to
>   > choose to do this.
>
> That doesn't address the issue I am raising.  It is a tangent.
>
> Emacs has the ability to do any computation at all, if a user programs
> it.  The issue here is not what Emacs "has the ability to do", but
> what it offers/encourages/suggests/makes convenient.
>
> If we are going to add a convenient facility to load external
> packages, it should be for ELPA (which is more or less a part of
> Emacs), not for other package archives (which are NOT part of Emacs).
>
> In general, treating all package archives alike is something to avoid.
> It is a pitfall.


I don't think it's a tangent. Emacs out of the box already favours ELPA,
and does not enable other archives. The default for additional mechanism
for loading external packages would be at least as restrictive --
i.e. out of the box, Emacs would only use this additional mechanism for
ELPA.

I would assume that anything else we added would also be usable with
other package archives. So, the GNU distribution of Emacs might, for
example, not ship with org-mode, but auto-install and then autoload it
on first usage. The same facility could be used by, for example,
spacemacs to auto-install and then auto-load any of the packages that
spacemacs provides.

It would be possible to make the use of an auto-install functionality
work straight-forwardly only with ELPA, but I can't see why you would.

Phil