straight.el: Advanced Emacs Package Management

[@tianli8172]

This has been one of the long time mysteries for me, thank you for taking the time to explain it 😁

[@machman23]

Wow very helpful information on straight, I needed straight to pull a soccer package in which the default Melpa package was not working correctly. I do have a rather large straight folder now in my emacs.d directory, but your video showed I could trim that back if needs be.

[@ex0stasis72]

Is there a command that allows me to automatically find the latest commit of every single package in my packages.el file to add a pin to that commit to every package that I have in my config? I know that Doom Emacs has a command to update all the packages to the latest commit, but only for packages that already have been pinned. I just want to start with the latest of everything, and then once I eventually have everything as I want it, I'll eventually never have to change it if I don't want to.

[@ablanchi]

What is the general consensus of security when it comes to using melpa/elpa? As someone coming from vim, where you just use vim-plug to pull directly from a git repo, why do emacs users need or want melpa/elpa? From a security standpoint they seem more like a liability than anything. Straight seems like a way around this by pulling directly from git, making melpa/elpa seem even less desirable.

[@SystemCrafters]

Good question, I haven't heard that concern come up very often for MELPA, etc. I agree that it's better if you are downloading the real package source directly instead of an tarball that someone else prepared. However I suppose that someone could still poison the recipe packages or repositories to send someone to a malicious repo for a particular package, but it's less likely to be a problem.

[@tsiiphsycoii]

It's as much as a concern as using a distribution package manager.

[@alexei3366]

Is it possible to temporary to not load specific installed package? Not remove the package.

[@masondear8016]

Any chance at a guide to emacs package management and configuration in guidsd?

[@SystemCrafters]

Yep, we will cover that in the Guix series!

[@To1ne]

Should I use straight with leaf.el?

[@SystemCrafters]

You certainly could but I'm not sure if there's an official integration for it on either side. You might have to look into how to define a leaf keyword, there's some information about in in leaf.el's README.

[@davidjeters]

I was wondering if you could cover the integration of straight.el with chemacs2. As chemacs2 has an option to configure it for straight.el.

[@SystemCrafters]

Good idea! I don't think there's much to it, but it's something I could show briefly

[@davidjeters]

@@SystemCrafters I wonder what are use cases. Such as when you should use it and when you should not.

[@alexanderilin8720]

Is this at all useful for Spacemacs users?

[@SystemCrafters]

Not sure! Spacemacs would likely need to support it somehow but I haven't looked into it. I know that Doom Emacs uses it

[@randomuser5237]

Sorry, I just don't see the appeal of using this. I can understand the need for locking packages to specific commit, but you should only do that when you have detailed knowledge about what this commit is and whether or not it breaks something. IMO it's a bad idea to directly make changes in package sources as it makes sure that your branch is probably going to be incompatible with other upstream branches so it would be a pain to update things on top of your changes. This package does nothing to ease that. And apart from this use case I see little advantage over package.el.