This is g-sorcery backend for elisp packages.

Installation

emerge -va gs-elpa

Usage

There are two ways of using gs-elpa

Using gs-elpa with layman

It the the recommend way and I strongly suggest it.

Then you should just run layman -L as root and find an overlay you want. Type of overlay will be displayed as g-sorcery. Then you add this overlay as usually and emerge packages you want. Always add gnu-elpa overlay first, as other overlays depend on it.

It's all you need to do. Example:

layman -L
layman -a gnu-elpa
layman -a melpa-stable
emerge -va clojure-mode

There are 3 gs-elpa overlays currently: gnu-elpa, marmalade, melpa and melpa-stable.

When using gs-elpa with layman you can populate overlay only with packages you want. To do so you should add a section named gs-elpa to /etc/g-sorcery/g-sorcery.cfg. In this section you can add entries named REPO_packages (REPO here is the name of repository you want to add) which are space separated lists of packages you need. ebuilds for dependencies will be generated automatically if backend supports this possibility.

[main]
package_manager=portage

[gs-elpa]
marmalade_packages = clojure-mode clojurescript-mode

Note, that some overlays may depend on other overlays, in this case you'll need to add those dependencies first (always add the whole gnu-elpa overlay).

Using gs-elpa as stand-alone tool

In this case you should create an overlay (see portage documentation), sync it and populate it with one or more ebuilds. Then ebuilds could be installed by emerge or by gs-elpa tool. This is not the recommended way and may be removed in the future.

Create new user overlay:

gs-elpa -o $OVERLAY_DIRECTORY -r gnu-elpa sync

List packages:

gs-elpa -o $OVERLAY_DIRECTORY -r gnu-elpa list

Install any package you want:

gs-elpa -o $OVERLAY_DIRECTORY -r gnu-elpa install $PACKAGE

Repositories you can use are gnu-elpa, marmalade, melpa and melpa-stable. You can use them all in one overlay. Note, that if you call generate-tree command your overlay will be wiped and overlay tree for a given repository will be generated. Be careful!

See man page of gs-elpa for further information.

Notes

• Generation of packages already available in the portage tree: Ebuilds for the packages available in the tree are excluded from the generation. To enable their generation you need to edit /etc/g-sorcery/gs-elpa.json file: remove packages you need from the exclude list in the common_config inside this config file.

• Excluding packages from dependencies: If you ever find bugs like this one, you can exclude packages from dependencies adding their name to the "external" object in the "common-config" section of /etc/g-sorcery/gs-elpa.json config file. For the example issue it would be (together with already added packages):

  "external": {"emacs": "virtual/emacs", "cl-lib": "virtual/emacs", "eieio": "virtual/emacs"}