Re: Easy configuration of a site-lisp directory

[Arthur Miller]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> 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.

I just looked at package.el and realized that it is already possible to
install directories, I wasn't aware of that fact. So the only extra work
is to make it recognize local paths in a list package-archives list, in
principle.