What do you expect from a package manager for Emacs? [closed]

Answer 1

I think that the package manager should take a lot of inspiration from Rubygems. I also think that it should have a site like Gemcutter.

A central repository could also be nice (like Emacsmirror). This however may not be necessary if a site like Gemcutter exists that collects all packages.

I think these things are important for this to work.

• Central location of some kind that collects all packages
• Easy to add packages
• Easy to maintain packages
• Easy to contribute to other packages
• Easy to install, uninstall and update packages
• Possibility to add package dependencies
• Common structure for all packages

So a package manager like Rubygems with a site like Gemcutter and a central repository like Emacsmirror (preferably on Github because of it's social coding) would do Emacs really good.

All in all I think that much inspiration should be taken from Rails and how Rails handles Gems.

Answer 2

Besides the mentioned above, i expect something like debian, and other repositories - set of the stable, experemental, untested packages. Ability to add my own repositories - i use lot of the packages directly from VCS, so it could be useful to create my own packages

Answer 3

I'm nearly positive that the best solution involves submitting more packages to ELPA and adding multi-source support to package.el. The Emacs maintainers have said that they would consider including package.el in version 24 as long as it pointed to an FSF repository by default.

Of course, submission also needs to be an automated process too; the current method of mailing the ELPA maintainer only works on a small scale.

Answer 4

Package managers don't offer anything I value w.r.t. single-file elisp packages with simple dependencies: adding and deleting from site-lisp has never caused problems. It's packages that depend on external programs (e.g., ispell), multi-file packages (e.g., auctex, org-mode) that can be tricky. Can't think of any single-file elisp package with nontrivial dependencies, offhand.

For these, short of a package manager, I'd like emacs' elisp-packages to acquire test suites which can be run en masse, and which provide useful information in the event of dependency failures.

Answer 5

I don't know how fresh this question is...
but the model I would like to see is CPAN. I also don't know Rubygems but it sounds similar to CPAN.

CPAN is a perl archive + library management system. When I need to write a perl program that requires... FTP or SOAP or JSON or XML or ZIP, or...etc, I can run the CPAN package manager, select the requisite package for download, view and verify the dependencies, then install everything. CPAN is mirrored .."everywhere".

CPAN works wonderfully for my purposes, and something similar for emacs would be nice to have. It also supports building C/C++ code on demand.

That's what I would like to see in emacs.

Some further comment on requirements.

• explicit download of packages. No auto install. No invisible downloads. I want to ask for new libraries or new function.
• I should be able to list the name/version/timestamp of installed packages.
• If my friend gives me his list, I should be able to diff his emacs state against mine.
• check-for-updates function. What updates are available? What do they fix?
• depedency checking, verification, and download. If I install csharp-mode and it requires v5.0.28 of cc-mode, then it should confirm with me, that I must also download cc-mode.
• there should be some sort of community ranking of these packages, like ranking torrents on isohunt. I want to see if a package has 3 upvotes or 3000.
• "transactional" behavior. If an install goes boom, it must unwind to a last-known-good state.
• failsafes. If I've put custom mods in linum.el, it should refuse to install a new version over my changes, unless I explicitly allow it. It should warn me before even starting. Do this with checksums/md5's over the existing install.
• have the option of running some packages from compressed archives, like zip files. So I never have any doubt that I have not updated any of the embbedded elisp.
• ability to use mirrored hosts for package distribution.
• all this function should be accessible through M-x library-manageemnt or something.

Finally, it would be nice to have a way to segregate or organize libraries of functions. Hierarchical namespaces. Emacs' flat namespace is very dated. This is sort of independent but complementary to the core function of package management. I'm not a lisp guru so I don't know how hard this would be; maybe there is already a way to do it.

Answer 6

I'm still learning Emacs, so I haven't had a chance to look into package managers, but a great feature would be to inform the user that the package is available if they try to use it but it's not on their system. For example, I wanted to edit a PHP file on a server once, and I tried

M-x php-mode

and Emacs was all like

M-x php-mode [no match]

when it should have been like

php-mode available from ftp.gnu.org. install? (y/n)

and then it would have installed and loaded up php-mode for me. That would have made my day right there.