Subject: bug#24070: LaTeX mode doesn't load in 11.89.4

From: Caleb Rottman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 14:53:09 -0600

> I must say that I find it far from obvious that it's unwieldy.

I guess 30 packages isn't necessarily unwieldy. I'll rephrase - I have had
many times where I start on a new machine with a newly installed emacs, and
I would like for all 30 packages to be installed automatically (instead of
manually) when they are missing (i keep my .emacs in a git repository).
Furthermore, with 30 packages, I would like all these packages to only load
when necessary, so it doesn't take several seconds to start emacs. The
macro "use-package" solves both these problems for me, but it fails when
trying to auto-install and use AUCTeX. (FWIW, it looks like there is a
workaround that people use specifically for AUCTeX by "requiring" tex-site).

> By that do you mean that you first go through the trouble of disabling
> the normal automatic setup done by ELPA packages, and then setup
> use-package for each and every one of those packages, partly redoing by
> hand what the ELPA package's normal setup would have done for you?

I was disabling some of the automatic setup. My original purpose of this
was to try to reduce my emacs startup time.

> Auto-installing a list of packages seems mostly unrelated to whether
> (and how) you configure them, tho.

It does seem that way, but it is convenient (and I'm probably not the one
to argue on behalf of use-package).

> Sounds like a problem with use-package.

I'm not really determining if the blame lies with AUCTeX and/or
use-package. What I am saying is that use-package is pretty popular and it
works seamlessly with my other packages but does not seem to work as
seamlessly with AUCTeX. It could be there's no requirement that a feature
is named the same as the package, it just seems the majority do (at least
in my experience, which is much more limited than the rest of you)

But I agree, if there were a warning when AUCTeX is loaded the wrong way,
that would be a big help.

Thanks for your comments.

Caleb

P. S.

I decided to go to extra length to not run (package-initialize) because it
was significantly slowing my emacs start time and running
(package-initialize t) made it start faster.

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 1:54 PM, Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> > I have around 30 packages that I install through ELPA.  Since this is
> pretty
> > unwieldy,
>
> I must say that I find it far from obvious that it's unwieldy.
>
> > I have these all configured using the "use-package" macro,
>
> By that do you mean that you first go through the trouble of disabling
> the normal automatic setup done by ELPA packages, and then setup
> use-package for each and every one of those packages, partly redoing by
> hand what the ELPA package's normal setup would have done for you?
>
> > which will automatically download missing packages and `require' them
> > as necessary.  This makes installations on new machines really simple.
>
> Auto-installing a list of packages seems mostly unrelated to whether
> (and how) you configure them, tho.
>
> > However, since AUCTeX doesn't have any (require 'auctex) line,
> use-package
> > will fail and AUCTeX won't install.
>
> Sounds like a problem with use-package.
>
> > Now that I know that AUCTeX will work when you just install it, it is
> > indeed not too hard to get AUCTeX working.
>
> FWIW, this should be the case for *all* ELPA packages.
>
>
>         Stefan
>