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

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 14:55:28 +0000 phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord) wrote: 

PL> 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.
>> 

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

Yup.  Pallet and Cask could be integrated together.

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

Avoiding the problems doesn't solve them :)

>> 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.

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

Yes. I think that's what Stefan was asking for. But Stefan seems to
prefer the elpakit approach, which is fine too (Nic has a nice
comparison section at https://github.com/nicferrier/elpakit).

(Stefan: would you and the other maintainers be open to Cask+Pallet
*and* elpakit in Emacs?  Or is that too much choice?)

Ted