Hi Antoine,
I had started on a draft of this email before receiving your latest
update; however, I the info below is still relevant.
Antoine Beaupré <anarcat@debian.org> writes:
> I still need to get to the office to confirm the fix, but this totally
> makes sense. I have a very old Emacs configuration, which I've been
> carrying for over two decades at this point. Cruft is bound to creep up
> in there, and I'm actually surprised things still work in any meaningful
> way. :)
>
:-) I feel that way about some of my config too! And I think you'll
agree that Emacs is great because it accommodates this, and that its
config and customisation becomes more of a "story" than the way some
people are using "story" as a synonym for "new user experience". It's
tangential to this bug, but I'm curious what you think about the new
trendy "literate programming" style configs? (I'm not sure if/when I
will switch to one, but I think it's a cool idea!):
https://harryrschwartz.com/2016/02/15/switching-to-a-literate-emacs-configuration
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sachac/.emacs.d/gh-pages/Sacha.org
> I'm still kind of confused. What's the proper way to (say) setup package
> repositories and then `use-package'?
>
If I understand the new Emacs init process correctly, then a simplified
form describing the init process looks something like this:
(lambda ()
(load early-init.el)
;; I suspect the init for the UI goes here
(package-initialize) ;; automatic
(mapc 'load (list of all supported init.el locations)))
I'm not a `use-package` user, but I think use-package stuff is supposed
to continue be configured from a supported init.el location...rationale
being that `use-package` seems like it ought to be
post-`package-initialize`.
> In other words, what's the modern equivalent of this in my
> `.emacs.d/init.el`?
>
> (when (require 'package nil t)
> (setq-default
> load-prefer-newer t
> package-enable-at-startup nil)
Please see note in previous emails about the location where
`package-enable-at-startup` *must* be set. There may also be other bits
of your init.el that must now be moved to early-init.el. Sorry, I don't
have a list... I trust the docstrings, so I don't think this is an
optional thing that can be ignored.
> (when (< emacs-major-version 27)
> (package-initialize))
> (setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/";)
> ("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/";)))
> ;; in elpa-use-package debian package since stretch
> (unless (package-installed-p 'use-package)
> (package-refresh-contents)
> (package-install 'use-package)))
>
> (eval-when-compile
> (require 'use-package)
> (setq-default
> use-package-always-defer nil
> use-package-always-ensure t))
>
> Note that I added this `(when (< emacs-major-version 27)' blob to try to
> workaround the bug. But now it seems that this packaging stuff might
> belong to early-init.el? What if I want this config to still work in
> Emacs 26?
>
There are a couple of ways to do this, take your pick ;-)
1. Use early-init.el on Emacs 27 hosts and add special cases everywhere
it may be required in init.el (icky, imho!)
* Note, init.el will need at least one special case for `package-initialize`.
2. Move what must go in early-init.el to that file, and then (load
early-init.el) at the top of init.el for emacs < 27 hosts.
* I wonder if there will be corner case breakage with this?
3. If you don't need Emacs 25, that means you're on buster, which means
Emacs 27 is available from buster-backports.
* This is the option I chose, to keep my config as simple as possible.
* Please note there's a IMHO RC (to backports) bug in the declared
dependencies. IIRC the workaround is to manually 'apt install -t
buster-backports emacs-common'. It might have also been this
issue: https://lists.debian.org/debian-backports/2021/03/msg00012.html
Sorry, I can't clearly remember...
* Buster-backports is also missing emacs-common-non-dfsg for Emacs 27
:-( Luckily it's arch:all so can be installed from unstable.
* Additionally, take care to either remove elpa-org, or upgrade it to
the version in unstable, since IIRC the version bundled with Emacs 27
is newer than the version in buster.
> Thanks for holding my hand through the new millenia. ;)
>
Anytime! Oh, one more thing, I've read about how old elc files (in
$HOME) have caused problems this release, so it's probably also a good
idea to erase them all and re[byte]compile them.
Cheers,
Nicholas
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