Re: Installing binaries with package.el

[Stephen Leake]

Achim Gratz <address@hidden> writes:

> Clément Pit-Claudel writes:
>> Sorry, maybe my original question wasn't clear.  The question was: I
>> wrote a command line utility in ELisp (it doesn't provide interactive
>> commands; just a command line interface).  What's the preferred way
>> for users to install it?
>
> I understood that to be the case, but it's a very surprising use of
> package.el and ELisp.  As I said I don't really have a suggestion at the
> moment, but this particular use case should not be handled as an "Emacs
> package".  You use Emacs as a VM for some scripting here.

I don't see any harm in this being an ELPA package.

>>> I simply don't think that wrapper scripts and/or compiling binaries
>>> is appropriate for ELPA packages, it just opens one big can of worms
>>> that I don't really want to deal with in any way.
>>
>> I don't understand this part too well.  Are you saying that ELPA isn't
>> the right place to distribute a command line application written
>> entirely in ELisp?  (Note that the task that I'm describing has
>> nothing to do with compiling binaries — sorry if that wasn't clear).
>
> Well, I would want to distinguish between Emacs packages proper and
> Emacs as a scripting VM.  The more I think about it, package.el should
> guarantee that it doesn't write outside the package directory unless it
> has explicit user consent.

That's reasonable, but probably not enforceable. The
'post-install-action' run by package.el could be elisp code that firsts
asks permission, then runs a shell script to run the compiler.


-- 
-- Stephe