> That looks like it'd mess with people's installed ELPA packages. In > general, hacks based on package-directory-list don't feel very stable.
If you talk about ~/.emacs.d/elpa, it won't, because there is a separate package-user-dir variable for that. The problem can arise if we have emacs installed in a few profiles, I'm not sure if it is a good idea to do so, but it is possible, in such a case we will have a few items in the package-directory-list. A fix for that: (setq package-directory-list (mapcar (apply-partially 'string-remove-suffix "/elpa") package-directory-list))) > Also, this seems to rely on us not deleting the -pkg.el, but probably > won't work for packages, that don't ship it, e.g. emacs-howm. It's true, but it seems relatively easy to implement a build phase, which will generate -pgk.el in case it is missing.