Installing elpa packages

[DamienCassou]

Hi,

it seems that more and more packages are available on ELPA and not as dedicated GIT repositories. What do borg users do to get these packages installed?

What I do: Build Emacs with the ELPA packages I want using Nix and emacs-overlay. I'm not satisfied with this approach because it means I can't easily contribute to these packages.

[tarsius]

I install the all-encompassing package/repository and then add submodule.foo.no-byte-compile = foo-helm.el. foo-helm.el continues to linger on the load-path but IMO this isn't any different from all those built-in libraries that linger on the load-path that I am also never going to use.

[DamienCassou]

Thank you for your answer. I don't understand it completely. Do you clone the elpa repository as a drone? Something like this in your .gitmodules?

[submodule "elpa"]
	path = lib/elpa
	url = cassou@git.sv.gnu.org:/srv/git/emacs/elpa.git

[tarsius]

My answer was to a question you didn't actually ask. ;P

Do you clone the elpa repository as a drone?

No, I install each package individually. If you also have epkg installed, then you can just M-x borg-assimilate RET ada-mode RET for example. This will result in

[submodule "ada-mode"]
	path = lib/ada-mode
	url = git@github.com:emacsmirror/ada-mode.git

I should probably change that and teach borg to clone from https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs/elpa.git instead, while making sure to only fetch and checkout the relevant branch, externals/ada-mode in this case. (This goes back to the times when elpa.git did not use separate branches for each package, but just dumped everything into a single branch. But since that has been fixed for a while now, I should also adjust borg.)

For most packages that are distributed on GNU Elpa this does not matter because the Emacsmirror mirrors the upstream repository, not (parts of) the elpa.git repository if appropriate. (Only if the former upstream repository no longer exists or has fallen behind a lot, then the respective branch from elpa.git is used.)

You don't have to know where the package is mirrored from, as long as epkg is also installed. You just give it the package name and borg knows where it can get it from. You can of course still add the other remote manually if you want.

[DamienCassou]

Thank you very much!