Re: Calling (package-initialize) sooner during initialization

[Artur Malabarba <bruce.connor.am@gmail.com>]

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On Apr 20, 2015 4:31 PM, "Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer" <
taylanbayirli@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA> writes:
>
> >> A user is likely to expect everything defined by a package to be
> >> available during the execution of their init.el; the failure to meet
> >> this expectation is why we get so many confused users asking for help,
> >> receiving the answer "just put (package-initialize) at the top of your
> >> .emacs".
> >
> > But the current code in Emacs's "master" solves this problem by adding
> > "(package-initialize)" in the user's ~/.emacs.
>
> I had not realized this is already implemented.
>
> I generally feel uncomfortable about a tool automatically editing a file
> that I assume to have control over, but maybe that's fine.

You're not the only one. Other people have voiced indignation.

> A concrete problem I can think of is when one has some settings for
> package.el in their init file, then Emacs ends up putting
> (package-initialize) at the top, when it should be after the package
> related settings.  Is this not a problem?

Slightly, yes. A person who does that sort of thing knows enough to
understand they only need to comment out the added call to
package-initialize. It would be preferable to not impose this on them
though (which is why the whole discussion has been revived).

> Other than that, it simply feels wrong to "solve" the problem with a
> trick like this as if initializing packages after init.el is the normal
> case, when the normal case is that init.el assumes presence of installed
> packages.  That is, behavior is broken by default, but gets auto-fixed
> with a trick like this.  WTF?  It might be simple to implement, but
> conceptually it's rather confusing.
>
> One might argue it doesn't get conceptually any simpler because there's
> simply one init.el and it's agnostic towards package.el, but that's both
> wrong (packages are automatically initialized after loading init.el if
> it hasn't been done there) and a sign of the package system being
> crudely bolted on top of existing machinery.  That's stinky engineering.

I'm not against a better solution.

> I hope I'm not coming off as religious.
>
> >> If nobody sees any disadvantages, and nobody beats me to it, I might
> >> start working on implementing the solution that separates pre-package
> >> configuration from normal configuration, including Customize.
> >
> > I don't really know what solution you're referring to.  But so far
> > I haven't seen any solution proposed that's really better than
> > what we already have.
>
> Splitting pre-package-initialization configuration from normal
> configuration.  (Here "configuration" refers to the user's init file as
> well as Customize.)  Making Emacs init look like:
>
>     1. pre-package-init.el, & Customize settings in it (or loading
>        `package-custom-file')
>
>     2. package-initialize
>
>     3. init.el, & Customize settings in it (or loading `custom-file')
>
> This entails extending Customize functionality to offer something like a
> :pre-package-init flag which tells the system to write customization for
> the relevant defcustom into `package-custom-file' (falling back to
> pre-package-init.el) instead of `custom-file' (falling back to init.el).

I'm in favor of this. I would suggest you send a new email as a separate
thread summarising what will be done, before you go through all the work
(though that's up to you). Something similar to what you've just written
here, with just a little bit more detail (like saying where the changes
will be made) and written with a clear statement of the advantages
(reconciling package.el, user code, and custom).

> By the way, I just noticed our support for default.el and site-start.el.
> I guess said separation of pre- and post-package-init configuration
> would be applied to those as well if we were being idealistic, though I
> think it should be fine to leave that be and only load default.el and
> site-start.el after package initialization.  Or can anyone think of
> valid use-cases for a site admin to hook in some Elisp before users'
> package initialization?

I don't think separation needs to be applied to them. If they're currently
run before package-initialize, just leave it like that. I don't know why a
maintainer would want to run code after package-initialize, but if they
want to do that they can use an after init hook.

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