Re: Elpa installation fails and general confusion

[Stephen Leake]

salotz <salotz@salotz.info> writes:

> Hello all,
>
> I've been struggling with getting ada-mode to install and work for me.
>
> I am on Ubuntu 20.04 and Emacs 27.1 which I compile myself.
>
> ELPA Installation Failure
> -------------------------
>
> The main issue is that the installation from ELPA does not work, even
> after successfully compiling, as it seems it is an elisp issue.
>
> On ELPA it says the current version is 7.1.4
> (https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/ada-mode.html) and this is what I
> install in emacs using package-list and installing ada-mode from elpa.
> This also brings in wisi 3.1.3

Ok.

> There are a few dependencies when you compile that would helpful to
> have documented somewhere. 

They are documented, in the Install section of the ada-mode manual,
which is mentioned in README.

Where did you look for this documentation? What can we do to make it
more likely that you would have found it?

> However, when in emacs when I try to activate ada-mode I get this error:
>
> ```
> Symbol’s function definition is void: wisi--lexer-error
> ```

This indicates that you have old ada-mode code in your load-path
somewhere, or an incomplete package install.

That variable is defined in wisi-parse-common.el, in the 'wisi' ELPA
package, which ada-mode installs as a dependency (as you noted above).

First, try restarting emacs.

If that doesn't help, do:

M-x locate-library wisi-parse-common

That should report ~/.emacs.d/elpa/wisi-3.1.3/wisi-prj.elc

> The NEWS page there however is listing the 30 Jan 2020 release as 7.0.1
> (http://www.nongnu.org/ada-mode/NEWS-ada-mode.text). Would be nice if
> this was up to date.

Thanks for catching this; fixed now.

> The tarball downloads page in savannah doesn't have any labelled
> 7.1.3. It looks like the latest there is 7.0.1 like the NEWS page.

Hmm. Apparenty I've been forgetting to upload for a while. I'll be sure
to upload the next time. Note that these tarballs are redundant with the
git repository, and no one is expected to install from them.

> PS I'm new to mailing lists, hopefully I did this right.

Yes, this was a good email, to the right place.

-- 
-- Stephe