What do you expect from a package manager for Emacs? [closed]

Question

I'm still learning Emacs, so I haven't had a chance to look into package managers, but a great feature would be to inform the user that the package is available if they try to use it but it's not on their system. For example, I wanted to edit a PHP file on a server once, and I tried

M-x php-mode

and Emacs was all like

M-x php-mode [no match]

when it should have been like

php-mode available from ftp.gnu.org. install? (y/n)

and then it would have installed and loaded up php-mode for me. That would have made my day right there.

Automatic publishing from version control

I'd love to see a standard, central, and single Emacs package manager. Right now, I'd put my money on ELPA, but there is still a long way to go.

The biggest thing that would help an Emacs package manager would be to make it super trivial to publish packages. In my opinion, I'd like to see this happen in combination with a version control system like git on a central hosted platform like GitHub -- something that would make it easy for authors to publish their packages and would make it easy for others to contribute back.

Similar to how GitHub (used to) make it easy to publish RubyGems, I'd like to see something similar in an Emacs package manager. For example, tag your repository with "vX.Y.Z" and have your elisp goodness automatically available to all.

The added benefit of using a popular backend like GitHub is that you'd immediately get a lot of exposure which should help drive its success.

What I expect most is that everything useful is on it, and works well. This requires you (or a team of maintainers) to aggressively pursue packaging everything for it, and doing whatever that involves — emailing every author of a useful package, and so on.

For instance, the reason Debian (and its derivatives: Ubuntu etc.) is so good is that you can happily use your system without ever having to install something outside the repositories, and that everything on it is thoroughly tested. The actual features of the package manager are important, but secondary to the managed packages themselves.

Easy configuration synchronization: I, like many people, use Emacs on many different computers and servers, some of them my own and some not. It would be amazing if the package manager had some sort of file which I could transfer from one computer to another; then, on the latter computer, the package manager would bring my Emacs into the state I like it in -- all the packages installed and configurations set. Combined with the ability to be able to easily install either site-wide (if one has root permissions) or as a single user, I could synchronize all of Emacsen everywhere.

I'm nearly positive that the best solution involves submitting more packages to ELPA and adding multi-source support to package.el. The Emacs maintainers have said that they would consider including package.el in version 24 as long as it pointed to an FSF repository by default.

Of course, submission also needs to be an automated process too; the current method of mailing the ELPA maintainer only works on a small scale.

No matter how this is done, the most important thing in my opinion is that it should be trivial to submit packages to the repository. At the same time, we do not want those packages to be instantly available, to guard against malicious code(and due to licensing issues). Unless there is a "trust" system in place, based on crypto signatures.

Also useful:

• "metapackages", to install several packages at once.
• In the same way, we should be able to install a set of elisp files, for maintainability
• "Broken" packages should not be allowed to disrupt Emacs startup. This is easy and I have it implemented in my own .emacs
• Ability to install files other than scripts. This is often overlooked, but very useful. You'd be able to, for instance, ship images, for icons, toolbars, etc.
• Versioning:package X requires package Y > 1.0
• Testing: perform basic sanity checks, testing for conflicts (keybindings, function redefinitions, functions that are expected to be present but aren't, etc).
• BUG TRACKING: I can't stress the importance of this enough. Having a centralized place to report package bugs (and being able to track them) is extremely important to assure the quality of the packages.

Some sort of compressed archive seems to be best to do some of the above.

---

So far, a much improved ELPA seems the way to go.