Re: Unboxed package manager

[Philip Kaludercic]

Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 11:25 AM Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> wrote:
>
>> Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > On Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 4:55 AM Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 2:31 AM Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> > On Mar 19, 2023, at 6:18 PM, Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>
>> >>> wrote:
>> >>> >
>> >>> > I've
>> >>> > done this manually on various systems I use with a significant
>> >>> > improvement in startup performance.
>> >>>
>> >>> It'll be interesting to see the numbers on the improvement. How much
>> does
>> >>> it improve startup time if there is x packages and y are loaded at
>> startup
>> >>> time?
>> >>
>> >> Good question. The systems I've done this manually on are one-off builds
>> >> of 28.x on sandboxed systems where the system emacs is 24.3.  So, I
>> didn't
>> >> have to worry about managing package updates with any frequency.
>> >
>> > I don't have any hard measurements, but my recollection is that
>> installing
>> > ~1200 packages on those systems and "loading the world" took something
>> like
>> > 5 minutes, while a similar set of packages installed in a unified
>> directory
>> > takes about 1.5 minutes.
>>
>> I just skimmed through the initial message, and when reading this my
>> initial thought is does the the advantage justify effort/complexity,
>> considering that most users have an order of magnitude fewer packages
>> installed (of which a few are installed using package-vc which IIUC
>> would explicitly not want to make use of this feature).
>>
>
> I have no idea.  There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem when installing
> packages is slow (even with a local mirror of the elpas) and having a lot
> of packages loaded slows down startup.

What is the chicken and the egg in this situation?

> I think I'm going to hack something together starting with advice on the
> existing package management and taking some inspiration from the design of
> Jonas Bernoulli's epkg and emir packages for tracking installed packages
> and component files in a SQLite database.

I'd be interested to see how this looks like.  As I said, I am sceptical
of the need to optimise these extreme cases for everyone, but perhaps we
can also open package.el to be extended externally in ways that your
work could plug into.

> Lynn

(Also, could you leave an empty line between paragraphs in your
messages?  It would make it easier to read them)

-- 
Philip Kaludercic