Pondering the Emacs add-on packaging situation

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 24 June 2015 at 08:01, Jan Synacek <jsynacek at redhat.com> wrote:
> Jonathan Underwood <jonathan.underwood at gmail.com> writes:
>> The Emacs package manager installs these add-on modules in the user's
>> own directory by default, but it can also install them in a system
>> wide directory.
>
> If you run Emacs as a regular user, you can install packages into system
> directories? That would be news to me. Why would anyone do that?
>

No, sorry, I guess I was unclear - installing into the system
directories would only be possible if you were running Emacs as root.

>> My thoughts are currently that:
>> 1) Fedora doesn't have the manpower to package large numbers of
>> packages from these repositories and keep the Fedora packages
>> up-to-date
>>
>> 2) It may be possible to write automation tools like elpa2rpm,
>> melpa2rpm, marmalade2rpm to automate packging for Fedora from those
>> repositories, but such tools don't yet exist. Even if they did, the
>> repositories usually aren't the canonical upstream for the packages.
>
> Managing Emacs packages by the distribution makes, IMHO, no sense at
> all. Users can easily manage the packages themselves via Emacs'
> package.el user interface.
>

Well, that's the way I'm leaning too. But then, I could make similar
arguments for python, perl etc.

>> 3) Even if we could generate rpm packages directly from the emacs
>> package repos, package.el doesn't have any notion such as "installed
>> but inactive" for packages, such that installing rpm packages of emacs
>> packages would activate them for all system users, which is
>> undesireable.
>
> Again, I'm not aware of how a regular user can install Emacs packages
> for all the users. If it can be done, you either have to have root
> privileges, or there is some kind of Fedora-specific polkit rule or
> something.
>

No, as I say above, you could only install system wide as root, and
then the packages would be available to all users on the system.

>> So, I am not really sure what a good way forward is at this point.
>> Certainly package.el could be extended to help us out in some ways,
>> such as having a notion of "installed and available but not active".
>> But is it worth the effort?
>
> In my opinion, no. I will repeat myself: Emacs packages should be left
> for users to install, since it's very easy to do, and they can choose
> From stable/development versions.

OK, thanks for your thoughts, very helpful.

Jonathan