Re: Unboxed package manager

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2023 20:48:29 -0400
> Cc: Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>, casouri@gmail.com, 
> emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > A cache will not necessarily help, and you will pay the price of
> > searching it at least once.  It should be clear that enlarging the
> > length of load-path is not scalable, unless we make it a hash-table of
> > sorts.  And I'm not sure we want this kind of complexity for such a
> > hilariously marginal use case.
> 
> Maybe 2000+ is marginal (today), but let's say someone just installs
> the 300 packages available on gnu elpa.

Why would someone want all 300 of them?  Some of them even contradict
each other, in that they implement similar features in very different
ways.

> Note I'm just installing
> these packages, not actually loading any of them directly.

Exactly.  So this is entirely theoretical use case, not a real one.

> Although if you look at something like doomemacs, people go to a lot
> of trouble to make packages available on their system without paying
> this overhead.  The simplest approach is probably just to avoid
> increasing the size of the load path when it's not really necessary.

As I already said: you can simply load each package by its explicit
absolute name.  Poof! problem disappeared.