Re: Auto-installing packages?

[Stefan Monnier]

> I use `use-package' to "automatically" install packages for me.

How does it work?
Doesn't this silently install at startup the packages you specified?
I really dislike the "silently" part (and am not too happy about doing
all of it at startup either).

Another related issue is the "auto-upgrade" part.  This one is worse
because it seems to inevitably involve some kind of "polling" of
a central server, which I find to be a serious privacy issue.

> The auto-installing, autoload would be nice. It would answer the
> long-standing desire to incorporate ELPA packages more deeply into
> Emacs.

Indeed, there's the problem of installing those auto-install-autoloads,
and admittedly, for GNU ELPA packages we could imagine pre-installing
them for all GNU ELPA packages, but I'd like for it to be easy enough to
setup to convince most users to use the same mechanism for
MELPA packages.

Also, pre-installing them for GNU ELPA packages obviously will only
handle those packages that are part of GNU ELPA when Emacs is released.

[ And, it's not necessarily all clear how to setup
  auto-install-autoloads for some packages, such as ada-ref-man.  ]

> However, to make it work well, I think, ELPA needs updating to
> support multiple versions of packages for multiple versions of Emacs.

Likely, yes.


        Stefan