Yes, I promise I’ll shut up about Emacs package management via ELPA any minute now.

Based on the feedback I had on my last post about using a combination of melpa and melpa-stable, I looked into using pinned packages via the package-pinned-packages variable that’s new in Emacs 24.4’s package.el. I couldn’t find any simple examples on how to use it, but a quick look at the source code and some playing around in ielm got me there. Well, after I finally upgraded to Emacs 24.4 on my main machine.

I’ve blogged about a little elisp snippet I use to install my preferred base set of Emacs packages before. Thanks for all the feedback, it definitely helped improve the code.

One issue that kept annoying me is that there is no simple way to tell ELPA to mainly pull packages from melpa-stable and only fall back to melpa for those packages I can’t get on melpa-stable yet. I decided to extend my code to handle that situation with some manual inputs as I know which packages can’t be found on melpa-stable. It proved surprisingly easy to do so after mulling over the problem a little.

MELPA has recently got its own domain (melpa.org) so it’s time to update your list of package repositories with the new URL.

Speaking of MELPA, I recently switched to their stable repository instead of their “regular” nightly build/snapshot repository after I accidentally ended up with a cider build that didn’t want to playing ball. This is not a complaint - if you use nightly builds etc you know what you’re getting yourself into - but it prompted me to switch over to using the stable package repository instead on those machines that I consider production machines. This of course require me to uninstall and reinstall a bunch of packages but that only took a few minutes.