Announcing: vc-use-package

I’d like to announce a small package I’ve written: vc-use-package. It is a first attempt at integrating the new (as of Emacs 29) package-vc.el with the now built-in use-package. I’ve already talked about how these two interact in my last post—you can see this package as automating things juuuust a little more.

Update (2023-05-18): This is now built into Emacs 30! Check here for more details.

Motivation§

For the last post, someone gave me some feedback: couldn’t we go a little further? In particular, they wanted a new :vc keyword for use-package, much like quelpa has done with quelpa-use-package. I already gave them a small working example in a follow-up comment, but figured this might actually interest enough people so that turning it into a proper package could be worth it; and here we are!

The basic premise is really this simple—we create a handler for a new :vc use-package keyword. It can be used like so:

(use-package math-delimiters
  :vc (:fetcher github :repo oantolin/math-delimiters))

One can specify most arguments that package-vc-install also accepts; for example:

(use-package math-delimiters
  :vc (:fetcher "github"
       :repo "oantolin/math-delimiters"
       :rev "master"         ; also accepts the special `:last-release'
       :backend Git))

Much like quelpa-use-package, there is some care needed concerning the interaction between this package and the use-package-always-ensure variable, but this should mostly be taken care of automatically. For more information (and manual controls), see the readme.

Conclusion§

As I said above, this is no longer only available as an external package, but actually built into Emacs! By virtue of being a part of it now, the integration with use-package is a lot tighter—try it out if you’re using HEAD anyways! If not, then don’t worry: vc-use-package will not go anywhere for the forseeable future.