Re: Babel related bug in elpa version 20121231

[Achim Gratz <Stromeko@nexgo.de>]

Robert Horn writes:
> Starterkit does have code that looked correct and proper for
> coordinating the init with elpa, and I think that for packages not
> used by org-mode it will be OK.  But, the automagic startup executes the
> lisp code using babel from org files.  This means that org and it's
> dependencies are partially loaded before elpa is initialized.  This
> means problems for org and any other dependent packages.  

Yes, and that's a problem already in ELPA.  It does make an implicit
assumption that no ELPA package is already delivered with Emacs, but
that is not true with Org.  It also makes the implicit assumption that
you can recompile the new version of a package when the old version has
already been loaded, which is also (sometimes, not often) not true with
Org.

I don't know enough about starterkit to know if it makes the same
assumptions.  The obvious solution for the problem mentioned above would
be to tangle the org files to elisp rather than executing them directly
and restart Emacs when something has changed, but that may not be
enough.

> I think the long term solution will have to be abandoning the automagic
> startup.

I'll try to make a bugreport against package manager.  I'm not sure what
will happen since properly fixing it would likely be a lot of work...

> If there were a "compile and install" operation in starterkit
> to take the org files and use babel to convert them into elc, it would
> be a little bit less magic for the novice user, but it would eliminate
> this interaction between it and elpa.  I do expect novice users to use
> the package mechanism, so they will run into this problem if they want a
> more recent version of org-mode than is packaged with their emacs.

I hope that a later version of Emacs (not the upcoming 24.3, though)
will properly move the bundled Org into a package.  That's been talked
about for a while, but has not happened since it will likely require a
few more tweaks to the way package manager works.

Meanwhile, one thing that starterkit can do as a workaround is to do an
org-reload right after the path to package directory has been installed.


Regards,
Achim.
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