Re: What exactly does "installing a package" mean?

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> On 2015-10-26, at 22:31, Kevin W. van Rooijen
> <kevin.van.rooijen@attichacker.com> wrote:

OT: Did you get that as a private mail? I don't see it
in the gmane.emacs.help threads...

> Thanks, but you misunderstood me. What I was asking
> about was a particular /implementation detail/ of
> Emacs' package manager.
>
> I've already added some packages - in fact, I'm
> afraid too many of them, from too many repositories
> - and I want to clean the mess. However, that mess
> is currently working, and if something goes wrong
> with the cleaning, I want to be able to quickly
> recover. Doing manual manipulations in
> `package-user-dir' seems the easiest way.

As always: this "clean" and dirty and "mess" and
minimal and bloated etc. etc. is based on
a misconception that is derived from the physical
world. In the physical world, things that are
sometimes useful, but not often enough, or perhaps not
right now, such things may get in the way, and you
might consider putting other stuff there, instead.

OTOH, in a computer system, it doesn't work like that
at all. If the computer is well-organized, there is no
mess in having one zillion packages or binaries or
shell functions or scripts, or all of that at the same
time, as long as they all

    1) work, and

    2) serve a specific purpose

They don't get in the way; they don't interfere with
each other; and, you never know when you might need
them. So *keep* the "mess"!

That said, with Emacs you basically need a bunch of
.el files which you can just as well load manually.
They can be compiled if you wish.

If you use a package manager then the whole point of
having one of those is when you don't want to do stuff
manually. To install stuff with the package manager,
and then remove it manually or otherwise alter it
manually, I can't see that leading to anything but
inconsistency and confusion...

But, to answer your question, no, there is nothing to
it but files and directories, just like everything
else on a Unix system. So alter it all exactly like
you please. Only, especially since it works, I don't
see any gain in doing so - on the contrary it'll be
error-prone and time-consuming. Only if you enjoy it
you should do it.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573