Re: XEmacs 21.0b46, Packages
John W Jones <jj(a)hobbes.la.asu.edu> writes:
I sent a patch many moons ago to fix this problem. In some sense
packge-get-update-all does not currently do the right thing. It uses
package-get-all which fetches dependent packages. This is bad since
someone may intentionally not have a certain package even though it is
declared as required by a package they do have (e.g., vm is not really
needed to use efs). Fetching of dependent packages should be done at
the time a user initially gets a package.
The real problem is that you're trying to fit a square peg into a
round hole, unfortunately we don't have the round peg done yet.
The dependencies as currently listed in the package-info files and
collected into the package-get-base.el file are bytecompile-time
dependencies. There may or may not be a run-time dependency. In the
case of EFS and VM there is a sort of degraded-mode -- so long as you
never use the VM support in EFS you don't need to have VM around. The
same is true for Gnus and RMAIL.
Someone was working on a dependency analyzer some time ago, but it
appears to have never seen the light of day. Most unfortunately,
because it sounded as if it were doing everything right. :-(