Re: package.el dependencies

[Thierry Volpiatto]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> I don't think we need an alist for that. Simply marking which packages
>> were installed explicitly in a plain list should be enough.
>
> Agreed.
>
>> (In fact, maybe the "instaleed explicitly" flag could be stored in
>> `package-alist' too, instead of its own list.)
>
> You can integrate the data into package-alist, but it needs to be stored
> elsewhere since it needs to be stored into a file (my preference is to
> store it into a Custom var and rely on Custom to save that into a file).

I don't think it will be enough, we will have to store also a plain list
of the package to autoremove because the info about the dependencies in
package-alist will not be anymore available when deinstalling a package
unless autoremove is launched right now before quitting emacs, which is
not what we want.

1) install a package, it is added to the package-installed-directly
list.
2) store this list.
3) delete the package it is removed from package-alist, and we should
also remove it from package-installed-directly list.
4) quit emacs
5) restart emacs, even if we kept the package in
packages-installed-directly (why) we will not have the dependencies in
package-alist, so we will have to fetch these infos again, recompute the
autoremove list etc... IMO it is simpler to delete the package from the
packages-installed-directly list as soon it is removed and store also the
autoremove list.

-- 
Thierry
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