Re: package.el

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "David" == David Reitter <address@hidden> writes:

>> Currently this is done by loading the "-pkg.el" file from the package,
>> which then invokes define-package.

David> ..but that would mean that each package has to have an extra file.
David> Many packages consist of only a single .el source file, which then
David> doesn't even need to be tar'ed for distribution.

Yes.  Please look at package.el.  This is what it does; for single
files it generates the -pkg.el and -autoloads.el files.  For
multi-file packages, my belief is that adding a single file containing
a single form is not a major maintenance burden.

>> I don't see how feature-version would be defined until a package is
>> loaded -- but that is what we want to avoid.

David> How about looking for some tags ;; pkg:define and ;; pkg:end inside
David> the source file, and then evaluating only what's within those tags?

package.el uses the comments to generate the -pkg.el file.

I'm reasonably sure that I don't want to do this scanning every time
Emacs starts up.  But I admit I have not benchmarked the scanning
approach.

Tom