#847690 dh-elpa: better handling of `deftheme' themes

Package:
dh-elpa
Source:
dh-elpa
Submitter:
Sean Whitton
Date:
2019-12-03 04:24:03 UTC
Severity:
normal
#847690#5
Date:
2016-12-10 16:40:03 UTC
From:
To:
Function autoloads are handled elegantly by dh-elpa.  After installing a
package, you can just put (turn-on-some-global-minor-mode) in your
~/.emacs, and everything works fine.

Themes defined with `deftheme' don't work so well.  After installing a
theme, a simple call to `load-theme' in your ~/.emacs will fail.

Two possible workarounds are:

    (package-initialize)
    (load-theme 'zenburn t)

or

    (add-hook 'after-init-hook (lambda () (load-theme 'zenburn)))

but this really shouldn't be necessary.  In short, ELPA packages
supplying themes are currently second-class citizens in the elpa-*
namespace.

I'm filing this bug against dh-elpa for the time being, but there might
not be any sane patch to dh-elpa that will resolve the issue.  The only
solution might be to implement autoloads for defthemes upstream.

If you are hitting this bug with your package, a sample README.Debian
giving a workaround for users is available in src:zenburn-emacs.
#847690#10
Date:
2016-12-13 10:53:00 UTC
From:
To:
[2016-12-10 09:40] Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>

Thank you for filing bug.

I see two actions we can perform to improve our situation.

 1. Install README.Debian file by dh-elpa if we detect that package is
    theme and no README.Debian is already provided. If README.Debian is
    provided, we can grep it for 'package-initialize', to ensure that
    it mentions this issue.

 2. We can advice #'load-theme. Something like this:

	~~~elisp
	(defadvice load-theme
	    (before load-theme-before-enabling (theme no-confirm no-enable))
	  "Function autoloads are handled elegantly by dh-elpa.  After installing a
	package, you can just put (turn-on-some-global-minor-mode) in your
	~/.emacs, and everything works fine.

	Themes defined with `deftheme' don't work so well.  After installing a
	theme, a simple call to `load-theme' in your ~/.emacs will fail. This advice
	'require's a feature, that correspond to theme to be loaded."
	  (ignore-errors
	    (require (intern (format "%s-theme" theme)))))
	~~~

    I know that advices are dangerous, but I believe that this one can
    not have any implications, beside negligible perfomance ones.
#847690#15
Date:
2016-12-13 18:23:43 UTC
From:
To:
Hello Dmitry,

You CCed your message to <submit@bugs.debian.org> instead of
<847690@bugs.debian.org>.  I've resent it for you.  Please check To,Cc
carefully!

As I said in another thread, I don't think we should implement code to
merge a note into README.Debian when this is at best a temporary
solution.  Too many edge cases.

Thank you very much for this code snippet.  dh_elpa could add it to the
emacsen-startup script for a theme package.  I'll look into implementing
this towards the end of this month.
#847690#20
Date:
2016-12-15 02:12:28 UTC
From:
To:
[2016-12-13 11:23] Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>

Sorry. Will make some automatic check one day.

Fine. I agree, that fixing limitation is better then documenting it.

Ok.
#847690#25
Date:
2019-12-03 04:21:20 UTC
From:
To:
Hello,

Hmm, I'm not sure, but perhaps this problem is not actually about
`deftheme' themes.  I think perhaps no dh_elpa package autoloads happen
until `package-initialize' is called.  That would make this a 'wontfix'.