GNU Emacs Lisp Package Archive

The GNU Emacs Lisp Package Archive is a repository which the GNU Emacs Package Manager can use to simply install or update key emacs packages, such as org-mode. Apparently, according to the Org-mode FAQs it is a standard part of the Emacs 24 distribution1), available for easy installation in Emacs 23, too.

Fetching and placing the Package Manager

I followed their instructions, to check that it wasn't already installed:

M-x list-packages 
[No Match]

Downloaded it from their link, whence it arrives named lisp_emacs-lisp_package.el; this tells me to put it in my d:/usr/emacs-23/lisp/emacs-lisp folder and prune the name down to package.el.

Adding load call to the init file

Their instructions then provide the lines to add to one's emacs initialization file to have the package manager loaded on start-up.

;; change "~/elisp/" as appropiate
(setq load-path (cons "~/elisp" load-path))

;; Add the below lines *at the end* of your .emacs. This
;; ensures that packages installed with package manager
;; overrides other local installation
(require 'package)
(package-initialize)

init file on Windows system

However, I didn't know where to find my init file on my Windows XP system. I consulted the emacs documentation (not the first time, I assure y'all) to be reminded that emacs, on start up, looks for

~/.emacs
~/.emacs.el
~/.emacs.d/init.el

in that order, using the first it finds (and not applying them in cascade). Decoding this, one needs to find where ~/ is. As explained in the General Variables section of the *info*, ~/ means HOME in *NIX systems and finds its equivalent location in Windows systems at c:/Documents and Settings/UserName/Application Data/.

Sure enough, I found

c:/Documents and Settings/Maurice/Application Data/.emacs.d/

, a folder with no init.el (yet), just a sub-folder called auto-save-list.

Successful Completion

Naturally, I added init.el with the code provided, changing it as instructed to suite my installation:

(setq load-path (cons "d:/usr/emacs-23/lisp/emacs-lisp" load-path))

, restarted emacs, and this time the response to M-x list-packages was a buffer with a list of packages available from the repository, which now, after installing the current org, is :

all		    1.0		available  Edit all lines matching a given regexp
auctex	    11.86	available  Integrated environment for *TeX*
company	    0.5		available  Flexible inline text and code completion
debbugs	    0.2		available  SOAP library to access debbugs servers
epoch-view	    0.0.1	available  Minor mode to visualize epoch timestamps
js2-mode	    20090814	available  Improved JavaScript editing mode
load-dir	    0.0.3	available  Load all Emacs Lisp files in a given directory
markchars	    0.2.0	available  Mark chars fitting certain characteristics
minimap	    1.0		available  Sidebar showing a "mini-map" of a buffer
muse		    3.20	available  Authoring and publishing tool
rainbow-mode	    0.1		available  Colorize color names in buffers
register-list	    0.1		available  Interactively list/edit registers
sisu-mode	    3.0.3	available  Major mode for SiSU markup text
uni-confusables   0.1		available  Unicode confusables table
windresize	    0.1		available  Resize windows interactively
org		    20110903	installed  Outline-based notes management and organizer

How wonderful! This is much simpler than than building with a compatible make for my platform after locating and downloading from git (or a tarball). Thank you, emacs developers! :-)

1) where and since when is there an Emacs 24? Is it stable, beta, alpha? Today, 3 September 2011, it isn't in the mirrors in France
 
emacs/packages.txt · Dernière modification: 2011/09/03 14:23 par suitable
 
Sauf mention contraire, le contenu de ce wiki est placé sous la licence suivante :CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Recent changes RSS feed Donate Powered by PHP Valid XHTML 1.0 Valid CSS Driven by DokuWiki