Re: package.el, auto-installation, and auto-removal

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> On Fri, 07 Nov 2014 08:45:51 -0500 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote: 
>
> SM> `package.el' is great to install packages more easily, but it falls short
> SM> when you want to keep the same set of installed packages on various
> SM> machines, or when it's time to remove package you don't need because it
> SM> doesn't distinguish between the packages you want and those required
> SM> by those packages.
>
> (CC to Robert Dallas Gray, Pallet's author)
>
> Pallet does this: https://github.com/rdallasgray/pallet
>
> I am not crazy about Cask because it requires Python, but the simplicity
> of Pallet itself is appealing.  It uses advice and can be easily
> improved to integrate better with package.el with a few hooks.
>

Cask does use python, but only to launch emacs. Mostly the python side
finds an executable, works out what version it is and so forth. If it
were distributed with Emacs, all of this would be unnecessary (since it
would all be known in advance). It should be possible to produce a
shell/bat file for most OSes.

One advantage of having a command line tool for updating Emacs is that
it would solve at least some of the current problems of updating
packages in a running Emacs.

> Pallet is GPL-ed and I don't know if the author would be interested in
> assigning the copyright to Emacs and modifying Pallet to support a
> non-Cask package maintenance backend. If that was possible, the problem
> would be reduced to writing that backend and the package.el hooks.
> Otherwise I think at least looking at pallet.el is worthwhile.


All pallet does is pimp up package.el so that it rewrites the Cask file.
And (from a package management POV) all cask does is run package.el.

Phil