Re: user-controlled load-path extension: load-dir

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:33:35 +0100 Dimitri Fontaine <address@hidden> wrote: 

DF> Tom Tromey <address@hidden> writes:
>> If somebody added the feature you want to Emacs, presumably it would
>> only be in Emacs 24, leaving you in the same situation.

DF> Point.  I would still prefer to depend on user-load-path or something,
DF> it strikes me as more general: you don't have to edit existing scripts.

Tom is talking about one thing (package management) and we're talking
about another (generic Lisp snippet management).  Sure, you can do the
latter with the former, but it's a long stretch and is fighting the
user.  Look, if I just want to put a file with

(setq myvar xyz)

or the el-get initialization, or whatever in the user-load-path, why do
I have to make a package out of it?

By analogy consider some of the software that lets you put a snippet in
a conf.d directory, obviously implying that this is convenient for the
user.  This is just a sampling from my machine:

apache2
newer crons (/etc/cron.d)
AppArmor
Grub
libpaper
sudo
logrotate
rsyslog
modprobe
sane
PAM

Why not provide the same level of convenience in Emacs?  Other than
security, what's the argument against it?  We all understand the
benefits of modularization made easy, right?

Ted