Re: Package initialization

[Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 20 2015, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>  > Because slime-connect is supposed to create a connection to an external
>  > process.  Not mess around in with some mode-hooks and minor-modes.
>
> If slime-connect won't work properly without slime-setup, there's no
> difference.  If it's useful to do slime-connect without slime-setup,
> that would be another story but it sounds unlikely.

It wouldn't work properly without slime-setup.  Hmm... since we can't
call slime-setup from .emacs, I guess we have no other choice than to
call it from slime-connect too; very annoying.

> I'd have to hear
> details to say how XEmacs would prefer to handle it.

The current version of SLIME doesn't work with XEmacs; we stopped
supporting XEmacs about a year ago.

>  > package.el seems to be so designed that package installation
>  > implies package initialization.  I don't like that but I can't
>  > change it.
>
> I didn't get that impression.  It's one thing for Emacs to
> automatically scan for usable packages and add them to load-path, to
> set up autoloads for their entry-point commands, and perhaps add their
> data directories etc to appropriate paths so they can be found by name
> rather than a full filesystem path.  I don't consider that
> "initialization" because it's consistent with the "and the kitchen
> sink" tradition of Lisp environments (especially GNU Emacs), where
> packages that many users would never notice if they weren't installed
> are often included with the core distribution.

I have the impression that the left hand doesn't know what the right
hand wants.  In the manual they say that it's ok to add things to
auto-mode-alist, but then Stefan says that packages should not be
enabled automatically.

> It's another to change the meaning of user gestures, even in a trivial
> and "obviously useful" way like adding to keymaps.
>
> If in fact the majority of lisp-mode users find slime sufficiently
> useful, what I would do is negotiate with the lisp-mode maintainer (I
> suppose that's actually emacs-devel) to get the slime bindings
> "officially" added to the lisp-mode keymaps, and arrange for them to
> fail gracefully if the slime package is unavailable, eg, by binding
> them to a `lisp-mode-how-to-get-slime' help command.

I think we rather keep control of key bindings in our own hands;
especially as we don't always agree with the Emacs maintainers (like the
bindings for M-./M-, until recently etc).

Helmut