On 24 June 2015 at 08:01, Jan Synacek <jsynacek(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Jonathan Underwood <jonathan.underwood(a)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