Working with unreleased package code megathread

[Evan Czaplicki]

So this has come up in a few threads and issues recently:

• Installing Packages from Source
• The tedium of contributing to elm packages
  
• Canvas text
• Using a fork of elm-core
• Arbitrary git dependencies

These all seem related, so I have bcc'd you in hopes that we can figure out the short-term and long-term solution.

One route that works for the Char and Collage issues is breaking the code out into your own code for now. That's what Aaron does not like, but it works. It seems that the arbitrary git dependencies idea will work in the long run though.

As I have been trying to make clear, it is very difficult for me alone to keep up with everything that's going on with Elm right now. Coding on promises requires a sort of focus that is very hard to achieve recently, and I have been barely keeping up with PRs and non-list Elm emails instead. We must work together if we want these things to go faster, my recent emails asking for help are a serious thing.

[Kaspar Emanuel]

Sorry, I just saw you mention of this in the other thread. I think I need to slow down a little (disregard any previous comments about blank stares -- was all meant in good humour anyway).

I am a little confused by why this is an issue. Admittedly I haven't had a chance to really look into the internals of elm packaging but from an outsiders perspective: You can currently grab your source and upload it to package.elm-lang.org and then install it. Why is that second step necessary? What does does the package.elm-lang.org upload do?

I would have expected that I could give elm-package and arbitrary source directory as an argument and thus have my custom version installed. What would be needed to make that happen?

[Joe Fiorini]

Thus far I've been solving some of these issues by symlinking to a folder "elm-stuff/local-packages". Then I add that package's src directory to elm-package.json. I like the way npm handles this with "npm link". Perhaps we could do something similar with "elm-package"? Let's say you have a fork of elm-core stored in ~/code/elm and want to use it in your app. Perhaps you could run:

elm-package link ~/code/elm/src

This command would then read that package's name from its elm-package.json, create a symlink under elm-stuff/packages/elm-core to ~/code/elm.

Just a thought, obviously there are many ways to solve this one.