I’ve never updated my Emacs packages until recently, because Emacs is where all my writing happens, and so I’m justifiably paranoid.
But then some packages stopped working, due to various circumstances1 and an update solved it.

So I’ve decided to update my packages once a quarter, so that I don’t lose days yak shaving when something goes wrong and I handle breakage on my terms and not the machine’s.

As far as package management goes, I want to keep things simple.
In fact, I still haven’t graduated to use-package or straight.el because my package needs are few and conservative2. And so, while there are automatic update options out there, I’ll just stick to updating them manually, every quarter.

Ergo, this is the checklist I’ll use next time onwards …

  1. Stop emacs user service, systemctl --user stop emacs
  2. Backup emacs folder in ~/.config
  3. Start emacs manually (not the service).
  4. M-x package-refresh-contents
  5. M-x package-upgrade-all
  6. Problems? Quit emacs. Revert backup folder.
  7. In the end, start emacs user sevice, systemctl --user start emacs

There’s an Org mode task, scheduled quarterly, so that I won’t forget.

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  1. While I don’t want updated packages, I do want updated Emacs and that broke stuff 😂 ↩︎

  2. The biggest change I forsee, is if Jetbrains ever turn evil and I have to move off their editors and subsequently need to use Emacs as an IDE ↩︎