Needs to be more obvious how to install from source

aspiers commented 4 years ago

Currently the installation instructions only explain how to install from a release tarball. This has a few issues:

It won't attract developers to contribute to the project, which is a shame, because it seems significantly better than the "official" prettier/prettier-emacs in many ways and therefore deserves greater popularity.
It doesn't allow installation from latest master, thereby turning the release process into a potential bottleneck.
It promotes a low bus factor.
Lack of clarity over the build process leads to questions like #11.

While writing this issue, I accidentally found HACKING.md which provides the missing info - awesome! However this is not linked from README.md, so it would be great to add that link to make it easier to find :-)

jscheid commented 4 years ago

All good points. HACKING.md is probably outdated, I should check the instructions to make sure it's still good advice. Linking it into README is a good idea.

Note that I've been doing some experiments around VM-based builds over in the melpa branch. I'm not too fond of it but it might be useful as a stop-gap, and help illuminate the--admittedly--currently quite arcane build process.

aspiers commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the reply. I finally got this mode working using the melpa branch from #13, after some trial and error. Another gotcha I fell into was having prettier-el-home set to an older quelpa build directory which no longer existed. As a result it was failing to find the blob. When I updated the variable it worked fine.

aspiers commented 4 years ago

I'm now using this approach:

(defvar prettier-el-home "~/.GIT/3rd-party/prettier.el")

(if (file-directory-p prettier-el-home)
    (use-package prettier
      :load-path prettier-el-home)
  (warn "%s did not exist; won't install prettier.el"))

which works nicely after #19 is applied.

jscheid / prettier.el

Needs to be more obvious how to install from source #15