dabrahams
commented
13 years ago At Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:50:12 -0700, baron wrote:
Is it really necessary for el-get to write to my init.el, custom.el or wherever I have the el-get-standard-packages written?
There are certainly other ways it could be managed, and in fact @dimitri was not disposed favorably to me using the customization interface for this.
I think writing to a user's init.el file automatically is not ideal.
Well, I think:
- "automatically" is overstating the case. Right now you get prompted about whether to save your customizations of this variable. It's no more automatic than is saving anything else you do through the customization interface.
- Clearly, this is a matter of philosophy. For me, the customization interface is the standard Emacs mechanism for storing user settings that should persist across sessions and follow the user to whichever accounts he copies this .emacs/init.el/whatever to. Others seem to despise the use of customize, (some because it writes their configuration files), and want to manage everything by hand. I don't really know how to split the difference between those two camps, other than to tell you to do what you do with every other package: just edit your configuration files by hand. That seems reasonable to me, and I don't see why el-get should be the one package in the world to accomodate a persistence mechanism other than customize for user-facing settings.
- You could always use initsplit (http://github.com/dabrahams/initsplit) to put your el-get-standard-packages in a different file ;-)
I also find el-get-can-exit-p behavior to be a bit annoying, requiring an additional confirmation before I exit. I'd prefer that it do whatever it needs to save info.
Well, other users apparently often want to install packages non-committally, without any intention to have the packages be active the next time around. I'm not committing to this project anymore, but If my opinion is worth anything, I'd be open to interface variations, such as an option to turn off asking whether you want to remember installed packages. In fact, I may want that feature myself anyway: I'll probably install a hook in my config that asks about saving all customizations I've made, before exiting. Too often I'll forget that I've set something tentatively that I ended up really liking.
Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com
baron
Is it really necessary for el-get to write to my init.el, custom.el or wherever I have the el-get-standard-packages written? I think writing to a user's init.el file automatically is not ideal.
I also find el-get-can-exit-p behavior to be a bit annoying, requiring an additional confirmation before I exit. I'd prefer that it do whatever it needs to save info.