The code of El-Get has been pretty stable for a long time now. About the whole set of patches against the 4.x series has been about bug fixing corner cases (sometimes cases that had nothing cornery about them too) and providing more and more recipes. That’s what you expect from a stable software, and that what allows us to move to a rolling releases model.
In practice, it means that you won’t have to suffer from using a badly maintained stable branch anymore.
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.
The el-get project releases its new stable version, 3.1. This new release fixes bugs, add a host of new recipes (we have 420 of them and counting) and some nice new features too. You really want to upgrade.
New features Among the features you will find dependencies management and M-x el-get-list-packages, that you should try as soon as possible. Of course, don’t miss M-x el-get-self-update that eases the process somehow.
Using Emacs we get to manage a larger and larger setup file (either ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el), sometime with lots of dependencies, and some sub-files thanks to the load function or the provide and require mechanism.
Some users are even starting Emacs often enough for the startup time to be a concern. With an emacs-uptime (yes it’s a command, you can M-x emacs-uptime) of days to weeks ( 10 days, 17 hours, 45 minutes, 34 seconds as of this writing), it’s not something I really care about much.
We’ve spotted a little too late for our own taste a discrepancy in the source tree: a work in progress patch landed in git just before to release el-get stable. So we cleaned the tree (thanks again Julien), branched a stable maintenance tree, and released 2.2 from there.
You’re back to enjoying el-get :)