Emacs struggles to get a good package manager

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Kind of pathetic that the world’s best text editor only got package-support in 2012:

GNU Emacs 24 (released in June 2012) introduced official support for packages, that is, a way of installing extensions from a remote repository. This was a huge step forward for Emacs, as it not only allowed users to easily find and install extensions, but it also made it possible for extensions to build upon other extensions without having to tell the user “great you want to install this, just install this extensions and those five other ones, too.” It used to be that many extensions each re-implemented common functionality just to get around this problem. Now, we have a number of general-purpose libraries.

The attitude (experts can always do it by hand) is what drove me away from Perl/CPAN back in 2000, when I had to decide between Perl and PHP. I hope Emacs eventually leads in this area. I’m too busy to waste time on stuff like this.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://blog.jorgenschaefer.de/2014/06/the-sorry-state-of-emacs-lisp-package.html
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