using elpa and melpa installing

[mmrezaie]

Hi,

I am using your emacs configs, and I am thankful. I was wondering why you are not using emacs repositories for plugin install. This can make the whole git branch smaller.

[michaelpnash]

Glad it's helpful to you!

Honestly, I suspect it would be much cleaner to use Emacs repositories, but I wasn't familiar with them when I started, and haven't had the chance to go back and clean up. OTOH, it's nice to be able to have the whole config and it's dependencies in one download...

[mmrezaie]

Frankly I don't know how to do it now that I have changed a lot since I got your repository but if you look at my init file you see that I have function that checks if the plugins are installed or not and then it installs them in case they are not there.

This is the function:
############################
;; This part installs the mentioned packages in my-packages if they are not installed just once and for all
(defvar my-packages
'(scala-mode2 ensime sbt-mode dash auto-complete flymake table multiple-cursors move-text magit linear-undo
tramp dired-details ace-jump-mode dirtree window-number)
"A list of packages to ensure are installed at launch.")

(defun my-packages-installed-p ()
(loop for p in my-packages
when (not (package-installed-p p)) do (return nil)
finally (return t)))

(unless (my-packages-installed-p)
;; check for new packages (package versions)
(package-refresh-contents)
;; install the missing packages
(dolist (p my-packages)
(when (not (package-installed-p p))
(package-install p))))
###########################

as you can see before this function I have added melpa elpa and marmalade repositories.