Finding packages not managed by pallet

Question

After initialising pallet for my package managment I forgot to add the requisite line to my init.el :(

Having now added:

(pallet-mode t)

To my init.el is there a way to diagnose which (if any) packages are not under pallet and cask's control?

Thanks

Answer 1

My understanding of the way pallet works is that it looks at your currently installed list of packages and writes out the Cask file accordingly.

So, it's not as if in the intervening time any package installs or removals won't be tracked, since when pallet is initialized it says "What packages are installed NOW".

Answer 2

I'm not sure wether cask really rewrites the Cask file, cause I have two (independent) installations, that both have missing entries in the Cask-file that are nevertheless installed in the .cask folder.

Since I'm not really an elisp hacker (but try to become one), for now I only have a tcl script that writes out a Cask files that mirrors the current installed packages.

#!/usr/bin/env tclsh
#
# get-installed-cask ?cask-archive?
# print out a Cask-file with all currently installed packages

if {[llength $argv] > 0} {
    cd [lindex $argv 0]
}

set names [exec find elpa/ -maxdepth 1 -type d]

proc getName {fn} {
    set sub ""
    regexp {elpa/(.*)-[01-9.]+} $fn all sub
    return $sub
}

foreach name $names {
    set name [string trim $name]
    set new [getName $name]
    switch $new {
    "" -
    "archives" -
    "gnupg" {
        ; # nothing
    }
    default {
        lappend result $new
    }
    }
}

set result [lsort -dictionary $result]

puts "(source gnu)
(source melpa)
(source org)
"

foreach name $result {
    puts "(depends-on \"$name\")"
}

Call it with the cask-archive directory that you want to enumerate:

get-installed-cask ~/.emacs.d/.cask/24.5.1/

Simply use diff (meld or ...) to see the differences.

And BTW: change the hardcoded list of repositories to suite your installation.