@otijhuis: document a great setup is not hard, but we’re all lazy

Going back to package discussion — the problem with MELPA is that it provides a ton of "latest" packages with newer versions than stable. Once you add MELPA, you can't just upgrade everything, or you'll upgrade your whole setup to the latest and greatest bleeding edge versions. And as to "pinned packages", the problem is that you can pin one package to a particular repository, but you can't say "I only want this package from this repo". So it doesn't solve the MELPA problem.

@jrychter yes, that's always been the problem with Melpa. There's a whole discussion on why they decided to go this way, but the end result is that using Melpa means package.el will always try to upgrade your to the bleeding edge. That is, before 25.1.

This 25.1 thing sounds seriously good.

http://endlessparentheses.com/new-in-emacs-25-1-archive-priorities-and-downgrading-packages.html

Ok. Now I promise I'll stop bringing it up. :-)

I think we also have to keep in mind that package management in Emacs is quite new

and Emacs users didn't have any for > 25 years probably

True

absolutely

I’ve been running gentoo with ~amd64 for 15 years

though I can only assume bleeding edge packages in emacs are a bit different from those in nix land heh

it’s not the same

in Gentoo all packages are still built from “released” tags/branches

they might be new, but they were officially released

in MELPA the packages are just snapshot of the development branches

usually the packages themselves work

but often the changes in one package are breaking the ones that depending on them

Although, TBH, that hasn't happened to me that often anymore

And whenever a package is behaving a little odd, I usually find an update for it on the next day

The Emacs community has really adopted the habit of reporting bugs in the last year or two, which helps a lot.

yeah, I often say GitHub saved Emacs

it has never been so easy to report & fix problems and to learn modern Emacs Lisp practices

I’ve been using Emacs for about a decade now

but didn’t write pretty much anything until the GitHub era began

pretty much the same here

yeah me too, and emacswiki was such a mess but still got lot of stuff from there

a while back in a moment of huge frustration with the wiki I wrote http://batsov.com/articles/2012/03/20/die-emacswiki/

now, it’s significance for the community has shrunk and I don’t really care if it will ever be improved or not

@jrychter: you can pin packages to an archive in current stable emacs

that’s how I stay on cider and clojure-mode stable releases

(when (boundp 'package-pinned-packages)
  (setq package-pinned-packages
        '((cider        . "melpa-stable")
          (clj-refactor . "melpa-stable")
          (clojure-mode . "melpa-stable")
          (paradox      . "melpa-stable")
          (smartparens  . "melpa-stable"))))

mm nice

It’s incredible how much more comprehensible (and shorter) my emacs config got when I started using real packages and use-package vs requiring bits and pieces of files from EmacsWiki

one of these days I need to check out use-package again

I use el-get for almost everything now.

it's lovely