Re: user-controlled load-path extension: load-dir

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 04 Mar 2011 10:18:03 -0700 Tom Tromey <address@hidden> wrote: 

Julien> Especially if Emacs was able to build and load an autoload file for the
Julien> files placed in that directory. The user would have *nothing* to do to
Julien> use a new feature. Not even touching its `user-init-file'.

Tom> package.el does this, more or less.  It doesn't just load all files, but
Tom> does some version and dependency checks.  But, e.g., it is trivial for
Tom> el-get to be supplied as a package.  This feature is enabled by default
Tom> in Emacs 24.

OK, but there's no general facility to do this.  If I want to bundle up
some code and load it on startup, I have to modify the load-path and my
startup .emacs right now (which encourages monolithic configurations and
other bad practices).  I don't think package.el should be required to do
this kind of modularization.

As far as el-get, I guess it could be made into a package, but it's a
package manager and has to work in cases where package.el is not
available or the user doesn't want to use it.  I don't think el-get is
the only use for the general load-dir facility, in any case.

Ted