Re: package.el 0.1 - simple package manager

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Olson <address@hidden> writes:

Michael> I'm very interested in seeing something like this become a standard
Michael> way of telling users how to install an Emacs Lisp program.  I may
Michael> start making package definitions for Muse, EMMS, ERC, and Planner at
Michael> some point.

Cool!

Michael> One concern that I have is with the format of archive-contents.el.
Michael> Better, I think, would be to call it just "archive-contents" and have
Michael> its contents be of the form:

Good idea.  I've been meaning to make a change to this file anyway to
somehow encode its own version number, so that we can change the
archive format in the future if need be.

Michael> Also, for activation, it might be best to encourage program authors to
Michael> include just the name of a function instead of its body, load the file
Michael> named <package-name>.el, and run that function.

As Stefan points out, in most cases a package doesn't need to do
anything special for activation.  We compute the autoloads and
evaluate those automatically during package activation.  I added the
activation argument to define-package in case a package needs to do
something more unusual.

Tom