Re: document package.el

[Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com>]

>>>>> "Uday" == Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk> writes:

Uday> I personally think that upgrading packages should be a conscious,
Uday> deliberate action.  You never know what changes the developers have
Uday> put in the upgrade and what those change would entail in terms of how
Uday> you will use the package.

This is exactly why I didn't write package.el to work automatically :-)

It should be implementable, though, if somebody really wants it.

Another idea would be to do what Mozilla's plugin manager does: look for
updates in the background, and notify the users of possible upgrades.

Uday> I will also want to install the new versions along side the old ones,
Uday> so that I have the option of going back to the old versions if I need
Uday> to.  It is not yet clear to me if package.el allows that.

If you install a new version the old one will still be there.  You have
to explicitly delete it.  So, you can go back to an older one by
deleting the newer one.

This isn't foolproof because installing a new version of a package may
install new versions of its dependencies, and there's no easy way
(without reading through files in ~/.emacs.d/elpa/) to know what those
are after the fact.

Tom