Re: Interoperation between package managers

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 23 Aug 2017 22:39:14 +0300 Nikolay Kudryavtsev <address@hidden> wrote: 

NK> Let's say we have feature-lookup-list, that contains feature lookup 
functions.
NK> Each function returns either the feature, or nil. When looking for a 
feature we
NK> call each lookup function one by one until we get a positive or run out of
NK> handlers. So the first function would be file-feature-lookup, using 
load-path.
NK> Then we get one for package.el. And of course the first time package.el 
lookup
NK> handler is called, it does (package-initialize). In such system you can 
just cut
NK> out package.el lookup handler from feature-lookup-list to disable it, and 
each
NK> alternative package manager would just need to provide such function.

That sounds a lot like https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives

It's a good direction for "plugin packages", but many packages are not
plugins: they augment existing functionality or provide global
facilities that don't exist yet or can't be abstracted into function
calls.

Ted