Please welcome the new stable version of El-Get, the much awaited version 4.1 has now been branched for your pleasure. It's packed with lots of features to make your life easy, comes with a Info documentation book and even has a logo. That's no joke, I found one, at least:

Why El-Get is relevant

Emacs 24.1 is the first release that includes package.el, and it even allows the user to setup several sources where to fetch packages. Those sources, such as Marmalade, are hosting lots of third party code for Emacs. package.el makes it easy to install (partly) those software.

This is a very fine way of getting extra features in your Emacs installation, and one that is supported out of the box. For a package to be listed, its sources need to be prepared, and you need to rely on the central website you now depend on to be up and running and accessible.

El-Get is all about allowing you to easily cope with the still vast majority of Emacs Lisp extensions you can find out there, that is non packaged code that is only available on some more or less mainstream distribution method, ranging from EmacsWiki to github including bare HTTP personal hosting.

With El-Get, you fetch the package where it's located. There's no need for a central server to host packaged and released software, and it's easy to share your findings with friends, or even to publish any elisp code you write.

El-Get will also take care of final steps that package.el did choose not to support, such as including Info material in your info browser (remember C-h i runs the command info?), running ./configure && make for you, byte compiling the sources you just retrieved, adding the necessary autoload support, etc.

And of course one of the methods supported by El-Get is ELPA, known as Emacs Lisp Package Archive and implemented by package.el.

So definitely, you typically want both ELPA and El-Get.

El-Get 4.1 Changelog Summary

The new El-Get release is packed with features. It really is. I will only list some of them now:

And most importantly, El-Get documentation is now almost complete and comes in the nice Info format I know you've been expecting for so long!

Using El-Get

Here's a quick summary of what using El-Get is like, for a new user in 4.1. If you're already using El-Get see the section about upgrading. To install El-Get you need to paste those lines to your *scratch* buffer then hit C-j after the last closing parenthesis:

(url-retrieve
 "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el"
 (lambda (s)
   (goto-char (point-max))
   (eval-print-last-sexp)))

Then you can try M-x el-get-list-packages and browse through more than 2000 available packages. Mark the ones you want to install with i then type x to see El-Get fetch and install all those packages you just selected. Here's a summary of what's available to you in the M-x el-get-list-packages buffer:

Major Mode Bindings:
SPC             el-get-package-menu-mark-unmark
?               el-get-package-menu-describe
d               el-get-package-menu-mark-delete
g               el-get-package-menu-revert
h               el-get-package-menu-quick-help
i               el-get-package-menu-mark-install
u               el-get-package-menu-mark-update
x               el-get-package-menu-execute

Once a package is installed, El-Get will initialize it for you, and it will also do that step at every Emacs startup from there on, provided that you added some lines to your ~/.emacs initialization file, that look a lot like the previous *scratch* code you did paste:

;;
;; Here's a typical El-Get integration for your .emacs file:
;;
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get")
(setq el-get-user-package-directory "~/.emacs.d/packages.d/")

(unless (require 'el-get nil t)
  (with-current-buffer
      (url-retrieve-synchronously
       "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el")
    (goto-char (point-max))
    (eval-print-last-sexp)))

(el-get 'sync)

Then you can add files named like init-<package>.el in the el-get-user-package-directory directory, those files will get loaded when El-Get initialize <package>.

You can also use M-x el-get-install if you want to bypass the full screen package listing, you will get completion on the package name.

Community and development

El-Get community grew to be a really cool place to be participating in these days, with core and recipe contributions from more than 130 different people already, and with 526 stars on github and 184 forks. I almost can't believe it!

git --no-pager shortlog -n -s | wc -l
     137
git --no-pager shortlog -n -s | head -10
   734  Dimitri Fontaine
   336  Ryan C. Thompson
   114  Julien Danjou
   110  Dave Abrahams
    73  Ryan Thompson
    72  Sébastien Gross
    42  Takafumi Arakaki
    27  Alex Ott
    25  Yakkala Yagnesh Raghava
    21  Rüdiger Sonderfeld

Now that we have something that looks like a core team forming up, I'm thinking about scheduling much more aggressive stable release. 4.1 has been very long in the making, I hope to now have a rapid release cycle leading us to 4.2 in quite a short time. As that's not an individual effort by any mean, though, only history will tell.

The roadmap

We have lots of ideas and some rough edges to address, so 4.1 is only a stop in the release history of El-Get. Next ideas include better error management in face of rare corner cases and in face of external events, like when you did rm -rf a directory holding an El-Get managed extension: we should mark it removed and clean up the autoloads that came from it.

Upgrading to 4.1

This item has received some treatment in the documentation. The basic idea is that el-get-sources is no longer what it used to be, it's now only an alternative source location for recipes, like it should always have been. Not that you can still override in there some properties that you want merged with an official recipe.

The new thing about el-get-sources is that it will no longer be the authoritative list of packages that El-Get manages. That list is not either given explicitly when calling the el-get function in your .emacs setup, or derived from the packages that are known installed on your system (like e.g. debian is doing).

Also, given that it took us so much time to brew 4.1 a lot of packages have changed either their hosting location or even switched their SCM. In such cases an automatic update of the recipe will no longer be possible, you might need to el-get-remove then el-get-install packages to get them back.

Conclusion

El-Get 4.1 is now ready for public consumption, don't be shy, we've been a lot of users running the development branch for a long time now, I'm running 4.0.7.6901194 while writing this post. 4.0 is the development version of what is now released as 4.1.

Many thanks to all who contributed to El-Get and to all our users, I'm very proud that together we worked out a very nice and complete tool!

Tags

Emacs el-get release