compat VS straight.el

With the Compat library you can use define-keymap right away in your packages. See also my post about Compat.

Exactly, I think printing a loud warning is a perfectly acceptable solution. The note should ideally tell the user to ensure that dependencies are met. It makes sense to teach users a little better about the limitations of Straight or Elpaca with respect to dependency handling since I've seen many reports across the ecosystem where people didn't properly update dependencies. I usually bump dependencies when I really need new functionality. In particular with our Compat package, versions are meaningful and should be respected.

Compat co-maintainer here. Thank you for writing this post! One minor correction: Compat supports Emacs 24.4 and newer. Please link to the upstream repository at https://github.com/emacs-compat/compat instead of the Straight mirror, since the mirror does not preserve the Git history.

As /u/usaoc said, ensure-list can be used for this purpose - I use it all the time in my packages. I recommend to take advantage of the Compat package from GNU ELPA, such that you can use all new Emacs APIs even in packages targeting older Emacs versions. I am the maintainer of Compat. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/10iep0o/compat_29130/ for more background.

I released version 29.1.3.0 of Compat, the Elisp forwards-compatibility library on GNU ELPA. This library may be interesting for you, if you want to use newer Emacs developments in your packages without breaking backward compatibility with older Emacs versions.

I updated some packages which included updating the dependency compat.el to 28.1.2.0

Very dated and next to useless on large complex CPP codebases. Use a language server. I recommend the straight package manager. https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el

Have you tried using straight.el or the heir-apparent Elpaca? These package managers will check out the git repo of said packages, and you can easily fork them with magit and forge. That's that I do to contribute to packages.

Thank you for your time addressing all those issues and sorry if questions were misinformed - I found your advices invaluable to understand design goals of package managers in emacs.

I used straight.el, now I use Elpaca.

Doom Emacs is not a package manager. It has a package manager, which is based on Straight.el.

I have been crafting my emacs config for about 10 years. I started with vanilla and intentionally stayed away from frameworks. About two years ago I declared config bankruptcy and went down for a rewrite using use-package and straight.

First install straight.el (https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el)

ref: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

If you use straight and override package, you'll get a lot of your desired functionality for free. Straight's docs are excellent. I started banging away on my own setup from scratch, and while not perfect, it does what I want and the total startup time is about 1.5 seconds without doing anything to try to optimize it. If you want to see it, check it out here. Like I said, there is lots of room for improvement, but it does work for me.