package systems: GNU emacs vs Xemacs

[Uwe Brauer]

Hello

Since GNU emacs has now Bidi support I am starting to use it more
often, so naturally I came across their package system.

Here are a couple of comments and some suggestions.

1 I cannot judge how difficult it is to maintain a GNU emacs
package (and to generate one).

2 I tested in only on Linux Kubuntu, so I don't know who it works
on other platforms, but I would guess that there is not much of a
difference.

3 from a user point of view GNU emacs pkg system seems easier to
use, because:

4 you just have to type: package-list-packages, no need to set up a
server, no need to download a database.

5 once you fire up that command a list of available packages is
presented and it is described which pkg is official and which is
beta. That is more comfortable than the Xemacs approach where you
have to download two different database files.

6 if you as user want to install a beta package, it will be
installed in your local home directory ~/.emacs.d which is the
equivalent of ~/.xemacs/xemacs-package. So it is not necessary to
run GNU emacs as root.

7 there is no conflict between the experimental package and the
official one. As I understand if GNU emacs finds two packages, it
chooses the one which is installed in the user home directory. I
tried that out, installing an experimental pkg for GNU emacs 25
and then calling GNU emacs 24 and it complained. GNU emacs 24
could be only run when this packages was uninstalled.

As I wrote in my recent bug report, we have already feature 6, but it
seems that feature 7 is not implemented. So I suggest to give that
feature a try.

Uwe Brauer

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Post by Uwe Brauer
4 you just have to type: package-list-packages, no need to set up a
server, no need to download a database.

Patches welcome; shouldn't be hard.

Post by Uwe Brauer
5 once you fire up that command a list of available packages is
presented and it is described which pkg is official and which is
beta. That is more comfortable than the Xemacs approach where you
have to download two different database files.

Patches welcome; shouldn't be hard.

Post by Uwe Brauer
7 there is no conflict between the experimental package and the
official one.

Wrong. You're not *warned* about the conflict. This is just the
shadowing scenario that you've suffered from several times in the
past. I suspect that Emacs hasn't run into this yet because the
packages that cause the most problems for XEmacs users are integrated
into core in Emacs anyway, and so get upgraded in step. (They cause
problems because they're a gnarly knot of interdependencies.)

I don't know, maybe it would be better to expose the user to the risk,
specifically because of the situation where the user wants to install
an upgraded package but doesn't have root.

[Andrés Ramírez]

There is also a function "package-install-file"

that function let's You install a manually downloaded package from
within GNU/Emacs

Regards