[opam-devel] user-setup

[Louis Gesbert]

> - Yaron Minsky, 23/08/2015 11:51 -
> Have you thought much about user-setup of late?  I tried to use it in
> an up-to-date mac, and the emacs setup failed.  I think it was relying
> on some missing package.  Do you have any thoughts as to how we can
> get this to the point where it works reliably enough to be usable to
> newbies?

I'll look into it; there have been changes to the installation of emacs files for e.g. ocp-indent, and the according update of user-setup may not have made it yet into opam, so that might be the cause of your trouble.

I don't think we are far from there, and we have had a few successful reports, but it's quite difficult to test reliably. There are also quite a few improvements pending, which I'll get into opam-repo ASAP. One of them moves the bulk of ocaml-specific emacs configuration into ~/.emacs.d/opam-user-setup.el.

> Another thing about user-setup is that its operations are only
> implicit, i.e., it only does things on install, which means if you
> want to do something like set up a clean .emacs file, or even just get
> a list of the things it's doing, there's no obvious way.

Indeed, as of now its only "interface" is with opam. The new version should display some information about what files it is updating, at least on newer opam, but that's a bare minimum.

> I think it
> would be ideal if user-setup came with a command-line tool, and
> actually if it only modified files after you called that command-line
> tool, which would warn you about what it was going to do, and maybe
> even give you a way of immediately unrolling.

Indeed; the command-line tool is currently very limited in terms of interaction, as it's designed to be run from opam, but that would be well worth improving. At least having it list its current status when run without arguments would be quite helpful.

I'll look into this.

Best,
Louis Gesbert -- OCamlPro
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 473 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://lists.ocaml.org/pipermail/opam-devel/attachments/20150824/c751d0fe/attachment.sig>