Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 4449301: * etc/NEWS: Improve documentation of 'package-initialize'.

[Stefan Kangas]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

> I'm not sure if there's much harm in keeping it as a defcustom, so I'll
> let someone else decide whether we should change it.  But if we do want
> to change it, the patch looks OK to me in this respect.

OK, I must have misunderstood you above and believed you agreed that
it should be changed into a defvar.

Thinking a bit more about this, maybe we should add some general
machinery to specify that particular variables gets placed in the
early init file by default?  It could be a new property ':early-init
t', where Emacs inserts these particular variables into the early init
file instead of the init file.  Perhaps we could also add a new
variable 'custom-file-early' analogous to 'custom-file'.  Would that
make sense?

> > I've also added documentation to package-load-list and
> > package-user-dir to explain the above quirks.
>
> But this doesn't mention the fact that it still works if they use
> `package-quickstart`.

Please expect a new patch once I find the time to work on it.

> > Perhaps it would make sense to create a new node "initialization of
> > packages" which could describe all this.
>
> Yes.  Maybe it should be a bit more general and include discussion of
> customize settings.  IOW it could talk about dependencies and ordering
> between package.el, custom.el, and "manual Elisp settings".

Agreed, to make it more general was my thinking too.  I'll get to work
on such a section, which I'll add in packages.texi and name
"Initialization of Packages".

> > 2. Should package-quickstart have a :set attribute with a value of
> > 'package-quickstart-refresh?
>
> I don't think so: the refresh should happen when the set of
> installed/activated packages changes, whereas what you suggest would
> cause a refresh to happen at every Emacs startup.
>
> But I guess it does deserve a :set function, which should take care to
> run `package-quickstart-refresh` if there's no quickstart file yet, or
> to delete the quickstart file when set to nil (in both cases it should
> maybe prompt the user before actually doing it?).

Makes sense.  I could probably work on that too, if no one beats me to
it.  I haven't thought about the prompting, so I don't have an opinion
about that yet.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas