Automatically detect ELDEV_LOCAL

[declantsien]

Automatically set ELDEV_LOCAL when runing eldev directly from source.

I have a copy of eldev source using straight.el. IMO, It's kind of chore to set envs like ELDEV_LOCAL.

Does changes like this) make sense?

[doublep]

This seems to be too confusing. I don't really want automatism here. I have export ELDEV_LOCAL="~/eldev" in my ~/.profile, which is enough for most purposes. But I also sometimes run ELDEV_LOCAL= eldev ... to quickly see differences in behavior between local code I change and the stable package.

[declantsien]

I have export ELDEV_LOCAL="~/eldev" in my ~/.profile, which is enough for most purposes

Well this doesn't seem ideal to me. More like a hard-code setting, in my case I guess it would be ~/.config/emacs/var/straight/repos/eldev. I don't want this random path in my profile, mainly because I only want to try it out at this point.

The use case here I think (developer experience(installation process) point of view):

• Random user download a eldev-0.10.3.zip (or git clone source) from GitHub
• Don't want to use the install.sh script yet, cause it makes me think what changes it will make to my system.
• Try it out by using ~/.config/emacs/var/straight/repos/eldev or ~/Downloads/eldev-0.10.3/bin/eldev. It worked by downloading(or coping) a stable copy into directory ~/.eldev/28.0/bootstrap/eldev-0.10.3/ . To me, they seem to be redundant files, which also includes a bin directory...
• Later Emacs users most likely will make some changes to the el files in ~/Downloads/eldev-0.10.3 which will make no difference

Anyway, not a deep user here. But I do have some other questions:

• Will it showup in system package manager?
• Does it make sense to use straight.el instead of package.el? see the comparison. Also, it has a feature called lockfiles.

[doublep]

I don't want this random path in my profile, mainly because I only want to try it out at this point.

Then just run export ELDEV_LOCAL="~/eldev" in a console. Until you close it, the variable will be set there. From my point of view, ELDEV_LOCAL is a developer-only thing and should never be implicitly set. If you want it, you need to make an explicit decision.

Will it showup in system package manager?

If someone asks and someone takes effort to add and maintain a package. Such a package would consist basically of just the short script, because bootstrapping happens automatically. I won't make any efforts to arrange this myself in any distro, though.

Does it make sense to use straight.el instead of package.el?

No. Eldev is supposed to provide a "native Emacs" environment. Maybe using straight.el could become an option, but certainly not by default, i.e. not instead of native Emacs code.

[declantsien]

Thank you for taking my questions. Closing this one.