Carton goes Cask

Because of a name clash with another project called Carton (see https://github.com/rejeep/cask.el/issues/20), the project have changed name to Cask.

With this new release, there are a lot of new awesome features (> 150 commits), but let’s get rid of the boring stuff first, migration.

Migration

Migration is simple and should just take a minute or two.

1. Use the cask command instead of the carton command

2. If your Emacs configuration dependes on carton, depend on cask instead:

   (depends-on "carton") => (depends-on "cask")

3. Rename the file Carton to Cask
4. Rename the installation directory (default ~/.carton) to ~/.cask (don’t forget to update the path in you shell config)

(And ohh, don’t forget to update your .travis.yml and .gitignore files)

Source aliases

Who remember the URL to a package archive? I never do. So instead of:

(source "melpa" "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/")

use the alias:

(source melpa)

The README contains a list of all pre defined sources: https://github.com/rejeep/cask.el/#source

Project bin added to PATH

Some projects have a binary command, for example Ecukes, Ert runner and this Cask of course. To avoid writing a Makefile like this:

ECUKES = $(shell find elpa/ecukes-*/ecukes | tail -1)

test:
    cask exec ${ECUKES} features

.PHONY: test

All projects that have a directory called bin are added to PATH when running cask exec. So the Makefile now becomes:

test:
    cask exec ecukes features

.PHONY: test

EPL

Until this point, Cask supported Emacs 23 and Emacs 24. Now we also support Emacs snapshot and we do it using @lunaryorn’s excellent EPL package (which at the moment is bundled in the Cask source). If you ever want to use some function in package.el, do it via EPL.

One elpa directory per version

Previously, all project dependencies were located in a directory called elpa in the project root. This directory has changed name to .cask.

That’s not it. Now each version has its own sub directory in .cask. Here’s an example from Ecukes:

$ tree -d .cask
.cask
|-- 23.4.1
|   |-- elpa
|       |-- ansi-20121008.1920
|       |-- archives
|       |   |-- melpa
|       |-- dash-20130712.2307
|       |-- el-mock-20121004.2057
|       |-- s-20130617.1851
|-- 24.3.1
    |-- elpa
        |-- ansi-20121008.1920
        |-- archives
        |   |-- melpa
        |-- dash-20130712.2307
        |-- el-mock-20121004.2057
        |-- s-20130617.1851

Cask binary rewritten in Emacs Lisp

To avoid the pain of BASH and make it easier to add support for more platforms, the cask binary have been implemented in Emacs Lisp.

Next up is release v0.5. Check out what’s included: https://github.com/rejeep/cask.el/issues?milestone=2&state=open