Emacs Marmalade with-demoted-errors

2013-1-25

www.marmalade-repo.org was down today, which caused my emacs to crash on start up. Here is a quick way to get around the crash. Instead of:

(dolist (p my-packages)
  (when (not (package-installed-p p))
             (package-install p)))

wrap it with the with-demoted-errors macro, which will change the errors from crashes to messages in the Messages buffer.

(with-demoted-errors
  (dolist (p my-packages)
    (when (not (package-installed-p p))
      (package-install p))))

This isn’t so great because you might not notice when it fails, but maybe that is okay if you don’t try to get packages every time you start up.

You also need to consider how your subsequent elisp will handle the lack of the packages you desire.