Re: Easy configuration of a site-lisp directory

[Arthur Miller]

Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:

> Just wanted to ping this message to check if there is any interest in
> doing something with my initial suggestion?

I do something similar as you do, but I use it only for some loose
files I write myself, and for some I download from emacs wiki etc.

>> The fundamental idea is to have an easy-to-use ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/
>> directory where a user can clone any repository or create their own,
>> without having to manually add these to load-path, generate autoloads or
>> byte compile.

I have a question: is it desirable to use a working git directory as
installed package? When I write my own files, I usually don't wish to
copy them over to my "lisp" directory which I autoload in Emacs, untill
I am done. Admittedly I started doing so before git has entered the
scene. Now I guess one can switch branches every time one works on a package
between some development branch and some stable, but isn't it a bit tedious?

What you are suggesting is to effectively use "site-lisp" as another
package-user-dir (~/.emacs.d/elpa on my machine). You are also auto
recursing in all dirs, so if user wish to remove something they have to
remove that directory from the path?

Why not hack pacakge.el to use "local archives", would work something like this:

(add-to-list 'package-archives '("site-lisp" . "file://path/to/my/site-lisp"))

Or maybe we can skip 'file://', and just use path, say like this:

(add-to-list 'package-archives '("local" . "~/.emacs.d/lisp"))

Package.el would need to be hacked to install a package either from
a single file, which it can already do, or from a directory, which would
need to be added. That would also work out of th ebox with
package-quickstart.el generation.

The only bigger work there would be to make package.el install
directories.

Alternatively, package.el could treat local directories slightly
differently and just add their paths to load-path and generates
autoloads, but that complicates package.el slightly more which maybe is
unnecessary.