The next release of spacemacs 0.300 is trying to fix the issue of package update, by using its own repo where it will have stable packages bundle together I believe. At least that's what the welcome page says 😛

I noticed if your parenthesis aren't balanced. Cider can't auto-complete let bindings or a function arguments. Like:

(let [things 20]
  thi  ;; <- This does not get auto-completed

Contextual completion depends on searching for the scope. Hard to do without matching parens

Would be nice though if it could just fall back to normal word completion, maybe scoped to say 20 lines above where I am. Something like that.

> I use Cider via Spacemacs develop which pulls down the latest version of Cider, so I always go and look at https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/commits/ before an update to know what I am getting. @jr0cket Typical Spacemacs setup is around 300 packages. How many of them do you usually check before update?

@achikin I have 301 packages in my Spacemacs setup and use Spacemacs predominately for Clojure development and use org-mode and markdown for documentation. I follow the development of Cider fairly closely so am usually aware of changes to that package or the usage, but will check the Cider commit history just in case I missed something before upgrading a package. There are several other packages included in the Spacemacs Clojure layer, but I do not check them specifically. Its really easy to roll back packages in Spacemacs, there is a link I can click right there on the home buffer. I only update packages when I know there is something I want to make use of (or if I am helping fix a bug on a pull request). I check the Spacemacs change log before updating packages, because I always update Spacemacs itself first (using Magit). It really takes very little time. I spend a bit of time in the #spacemacs channel here also helps me keep up to date. Its pretty easy to pin a broken package too, http://jr0cket.co.uk/2017/03/spacemacs-managing-broken-emacs-packages.html although in my experience packages are fixed before I notice.

@jr0cket being cider user for two years I have already learned everything you mention in your article the hard way 🙂 My point is that as an every day Cider user I wish it could be more stable. Or at least some warnings/messages are shown before breaking changes are introduced.

Here’s the second part of the “CIDER’s Orchard” series https://metaredux.com/posts/2018/11/11/ciders-orchard-the-periphery.html Enjoy!

These articles are great @bozhidar, thanks a lot for sharing 😃