Re: Easy configuration of a site-lisp directory

[Arthur Miller]

Augusto Stoffel <arstoffel@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, 19 Aug 2021 at 09:25, Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> wrote:
>
>> Just wanted to ping this message to check if there is any interest in
>> doing something with my initial suggestion?
>
> The discussion about installing packages from a cloned git repo is
> interesting, but I would like to point out that your suggestion also
> addresses a much more mundane task, namely: let the user autoload (and
> maybe byte-compile) their own configuration files (the stuff one
> typically puts under ~/.emacs.d/lisp) without having to worry about
> updating autoload files manually.
>
> Ideally, this should be straightforward to do, but I recall having to

Adding directories to load-path is straightforward, and is easily done
when Emacs starts:

(let ((default-directory  "~/.emacs.d/lisp/"))
    (normal-top-level-add-subdirs-to-load-path))

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Autoload.html

> delve into package.el to figure it out.  Your site-lisp.el would have
> helped me at that point.

Generating autoloads is not that straightfoward, but have you checked
docs:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Autoload.html
?

I personally am using (package-generate-autoloads) and I concat my
custom autoloads with autoloads produced from package-quickstart.el, I
do this as an offline procedure so I don't wait for Emacs to check all
this every time it starts up, but that is an implementation detail.

Maybe package-generate-autoloads form package.el should be rewritten and
exposed to users as an interactive command or at least mentioned in
Emacs manual so it gets more attention by Emacs users?

By the way, I got to think of another thing when it comes to local
repositories: couldn't package.el install a symlink to local repository
in package-user-dir, instead of copying over code. That would avoid
having two different copies of code, would let one use cloned repos from
git directly without modifiying anything but package-install function?

I haven't tested yet I just come to think of it; but hopefully xref, help &
co, would work?