How to pin package to specific commit

[emacsbliss]

similar to what DOOM Emacs does, in DOOM Emacs, we can use :pin to specify the commit hash for a package. Does crafted-emacs has something similar? didn't find it so far.

[jvdydev]

Hi,

Crafted Emacs uses the built-in package.el package manager (by default) which does not support pinning packages (at least not to my knowledge).
Doom Emacs uses a third party package manager (straight.el) which has this functionality (which Doom Emacs re-exposes within its own system for package management).

You can use straight.el (or other third party package managers) with Crafted Emacs and use the additional functionality that way (see using alternative package managers with Crafted Emacs), but Crafted Emacs does not provide any additional facilities for managing packages itself.

[emacsbliss]

ok, thanks a lot!

[jeffbowman]

Pinning packages is possible, simply update the variable package-load-list (see the info page for complete information).

Here is an example:

(customize-set-variable 'package-load-list
                        '((doom-modeline nil)          ; disallows doom-modeline, if it is installed, to ever be loaded.
                          (tree-sitter-langs "0.12.8") ; only allows tree-sitter-langs 0.12.8 to be loaded regardless if other versions are installed.
                          all))                                    ; load everything else normally using the most current version installed.

This method does not prevent the user from installing different versions of the same package, it only picks the one to load and activate when Emacs is starting. This example came from a time when loading tree-sitter-langs (for Emacs 28) was broken in versions after 0.12.8. The fix was resolved several versions later. Also, there was a time when doom modeline was installed by default in Crafted Emacs, however, due to the number of problems it caused, we stopped automatically installing it. In my case I had it installed, but never wanted to use it, so setting the version to nil prevented it from loading or activating even though I had it installed.

Hope that helps!

cc: @emacsbliss @jvdydev

[jvdydev]

my bad, learned something new 😄 (also no pinning to a specific commit, but that's more due to the nature of package.el using versioned packages instead of git repositories).

[jeffbowman]

Yep. Although, that may be possible with package-vc but I haven't looked at that in a while.