I’ve been receiving some requests for el-get, some of them even included a patch. So now there’s support for bzr, CSV and http-tar, augmenting the existing support for git, git-svn, apt-get, fink and ELPA formats.

Also, as the install and even the build are completely asynchronous — there’s a pending bugfix for the building, which is now using start-process-shell-command. The advantage of doing so is that you’re free to use Emacs as usual while el-get is having your piece of elisp code compiled, which can take time.

The drawback is that it’s uneasy to to do the associated setup at the right time without support from el-get, so you have the new option :after which takes a functionp object: please consider using that to give your own special setup for the external emacs bits and pieces you’re using.

Let’s see some examples of the new features:

(:name xml-rpc-el
	 :type bzr
	 :url "lp:xml-rpc-el")

  (:name haskell-mode
	 :type http-tar
	 :options ("xzf")
	 :url "http://projects.haskell.org/haskellmode-emacs/haskell-mode-2.8.0.tar.gz"
	 :load "haskell-site-file.el"
	 :after (lambda ()
		  (add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook 'turn-on-haskell-doc-mode)
		  (add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook 'turn-on-haskell-indentation)))

  (:name auctex
	 :type cvs
	 :module "auctex"
	 :url ":pserver:[email protected]:/sources/auctex"
	 :build ("./autogen.sh" "./configure" "make")
	 :load  ("auctex.el" "preview/preview-latex.el")
	 :info "doc")

As you can see, there are also the new options :module (only used by CVS so far) and :options (only used by http-tar so far). With this later method, the :options key allows you to have support for virtually any kind of tar compression ( .tar.bz2, etc).

The CVS support currently does not include authentication against the anonymous pserver, because the only repository I’ve been asked support for isn’t using that, and the couple of servers that I know of are either wanting no password at the prompt, or a dummy one. That’s for another day, if needed at all.

That pushes the little local hack to more than a thousand lines of elisp code, and the next steps include proposing it to ELPA so that getting to use it is easier than ever. You’d just have to choose whether to install ELPA from el-get or the other way around.