recipes are missing when installed via MELPA

[aspiers]

I installed el-get via MELPA, but due to melpa/melpa#2127 only the el-get.rcp recipe gets installed under ~/.emacs.d/elpa/el-get-20180126.1603/recipes/. Presumably something is supposed to bootstrap el-get so that all the recipes get downloaded after install but it doesn't happen, so if I subsequently try to install anything via a native recipe it will fail to find the recipe.

I see that that recipe has a :post-init section but I can't see anything in that which would cause this bootstrap to happen. Also https://github.com/dimitri/el-get#alternative-basic-setup-with-installation-via-melpa contains no code to do this presumably needed bootstrapping.

It would have been nice if melpa/melpa#2127 explained how this was supposed to work, but right now I'm at a loss to see how it could. Advice appreciated.

[npostavs]

I think what happens is that as soon as you call el-get it installs itself via the el-get.rcp file which brings in the full installation.

[aspiers]

Thanks for the reply. That sounds like a nice theory, but it didn't work for me :-/ So again it would be helpful to understand how it's supposed to work. Like I said, I can't see anything in el-get.rcp which would do this, and I even stepped through that code to check that it didn't.

[npostavs]

Works here. I stepped through in edebug a bit. Looks like the trick is in el-get-read-status-file-force, which has:

           ((null ps) ;; nothing installed, we should install el-get
            (list (list 'el-get 'status "required")))

So if you had an old ~/.emacs.d/el-get/.status.el then it might go wrong.

[aspiers]

Ah! That would totally explain it. Yeah, I think the code needs to allow for old users switching to MELPA-based installs.