Cask v0.6

It’s time for a new Cask release. I began working on Cask v0.6 around christmas and now, over 200 commits later, it’s finally ready.

To upgrade, run:

$ cask upgrade

This release includes a lot of new features, which I will describe below.

Public API

We want to allow other packages to build upon Cask, such as Pallet. Now Cask has a nice API for that purpose.

See http://cask.github.io/api.html for more information.

Files directive

There is a new directive, called files. It specifies what files should be included when building the packages. For example:

(files "foo.el" "foo-core.el")

If the files directive is not used, it will use the default patterns from the package-build.el package.

This directive is used for two new commands build and package, see more information below.

Help for specific command

Cask has always had a cask help command to list information about each command and option. Now you can do it for a specific command, for example: cask help exec

New commands

Here are the new commands:

• files - Lists all files (see http://cask.github.io/usage.html#files)
• build - Compile all Emacs Lisp files specified in the files pattern (see http://cask.github.io/usage.html#build)
• exec-path - New alist for the path command (see http://cask.github.io/usage.html#exec-path)
• clean-elc - Remove all byte compiled files (see http://cask.github.io/usage.html#clean-elc)
• link - Create link to local package (see http://cask.github.io/usage.html#link and below)
• package - Create an ELPA package of this project (see http://cask.github.io/usage.html#package)
• upgrade-cask - To avoid confusion between the update and upgrade command, this command was added. It’s simply an alias to the upgrade command.

Improved and updated documentation

Cask has a new and improved website. See http://cask.github.io.

Fetcher dependencies

This feature allow you to install dependencies from VCS sources. I use this for my yasnippets collection. I want to use a separate repository and I don’t want to release an ELPA package for it. I’ve used a submodule for this previously, but now I simply do:

(depends-on "yasnippets" :git "https://github.com/rejeep/yasnippets.git" :files ("*" (:exclude ".git")))

See http://cask.github.io/dsl.html#depends-on for more information.

Linking

Linking is a new functionality that allow you to link a Cask dependency to a local directory.

This is useful when you want to test changes to a package. Let’s say I make changes to my f.el package, then I can link that package in another package that use f.el to make sure it really works. For example:

$ cask link f ~/Code/f.el

Run cask help link for more information about linking.

More quiet than before

Emacs is not optimal for CLI programs. It prints a lot of messages when you don’t want it. Cask now uses the shut-up package to be a bit more quiet. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to hide all output. We have reported this as an issue to the Emacs developers and hopefully they will do something about it.

If you want full output, use the --verbose option.

Path and load path pollution

Previously, the path and load-path commands included every directory in the .cask/EMACS-VERSION/elpa directory. Now it only includes package directories.

Loading only packages

Previously, if you removed a package from the Cask-file it would still be loaded when you started Emacs. Now, only the packages specified in the Cask-file are loaded.

Breaking changes

This release adds a lot of functionality, but does not break a lot of old functionality. The only thing breaking, is that the old command called package is now called pkg-file.

That’s it folks, enjoy!