Should straight delete the /elpa folder?

[countvajhula]

Hi there, this is a great package!

I migrated my config to straight and discovered that there were still packages found to be missing in a new environment. It turned out that this was because the /elpa directory still contained all of the locally installed packages in the original environment, some of which weren't indicated in the init config.

Should straight do one of the following:

1. delete the /elpa folder, or, as this may be too invasive,
2. unset the package-user-dir variable in some way, maybe by setting it to nil, since it looks like this path is used by Emacs to find packages (and is set to ~/.emacs.d/elpa by default)
3. document some other appropriate manual way to handle this

[progfolio]

Good question.
I agree that deleting the folder may be a bit much. Say someone just wants to try straight, but decides they like their previous set-up better. A combination of 2 & 3 sound reasonable to me.

[raxod502]

Disabling package.el is already done automatically out of the box by straight.el. However, if you're using Emacs 27 or more recent, then package.el is initialized before loading the init-file, which bypasses this mechanism. In that case, you should put

(setq package-enable-at-startup nil)

into early-init.el. See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Early-Init-File.html for docs on the early init-file.

The informational content of this comment should be part of the official straight.el documentation; see #420.

[countvajhula]

I've confirmed that adding that line in early-init.el prevents the contents of /elpa from being used locally 👍

I also added this step to this blog post on the subject (please let me know if I missed anything 🧛 ).