On 24 June 2015 at 08:01, Jan Synacek <jsynacek@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Jonathan Underwood <jonathan.underwood@xxxxxxxxx> 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 -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
