elpa startup

["Barak A. Pearlmutter" <barak@pearlmutter.net>]

I'm converting my most trivial emacs package, vala-mode-el, to
elpa-vala-mode.  In vala-mode-el, the emacsen-startup file contains this
snippet:

    (autoload 'vala-mode "vala-mode" "Major mode for editing Vala code." t)
    (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.vala$" . vala-mode))
    (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.vapi$" . vala-mode))
    (add-to-list 'file-coding-system-alist '("\\.vala$" . utf-8))
    (add-to-list 'file-coding-system-alist '("\\.vapi$" . utf-8))

The dh_elpa stuff handles the autoload, of course.

But how do I get the auto-mode-alist tweaked to made this the default
mode for .vala files?

Also, if I add a transition package

  Package: vala-mode-el
  Architecture: all
  Depends: elpa-vala-mode
  Description: Transition Package, vala-mode-el to elpa-vala-mode
   Vala mode has been elpa-fied and this is the transition package,
   vala-mode-el to elpa-vala-mode.

I get a horrible dh_elpa-time error.  Is there some approved way of
generating a transition package?  Or in general, getting dh-elpa to
ignore some generated package?  (In an ideal world dh_elpa could just be
told the old package name and it would generate a transition package
itself, but that would be quite a trick.)

					--Barak.