Carton for Emacs

This weekend, I finally had some time to work on Ecukes. Just when I was about to start, I saw an issue by Joel McCracken on my package-spec project.

He said he had been looking at “modernizing” the emacs package development stack, meaning that Emacs package developers should not have to use git submodules to handle dependencies.

Emediately, he caught my attention. It’s so easy to be a package developer for Emacs and yet at the same time it’s sooo hard and annoying. Writing the code is easy, but distributing the package with its dependencies is something else.

Anyway… No Ecukes work for me this weekend. Instead, I ended up writing a new package, called carton. The goal is to make Emacs dependency management made easy, or at least as easy as it can without involving Emacs core.

It works for both your local Emacs installation and the packages you are developing. All instructions are in the README, but to give you an idea, this is my set up from my local Emacs installation:

(source "melpa" "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/")
(source "marmalade" "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")

(depends-on "carton")
(depends-on "wrap-region")
(depends-on "coffee-mode")
(depends-on "drag-stuff")
(depends-on "expand-region")
(depends-on "html-script-src")
(depends-on "htmlize")
(depends-on "magit")
(depends-on "projectile")
(depends-on "ruby-end")
(depends-on "ruby-tools")
;; ...

And for my wrap-region project:

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

(package "wrap-region" "0.6.0" "Wrap region with stuff.")

(development
 (depends-on "ecukes")
 (depends-on "espuds"))