I’ve been trying to up my use-package game recently and converted my hand rolled package check and installer to use-package. I usually prefer to use packages from melpa-stable so I pin the default package source used by use-package to melpa-stable and override it where necessary That’s working well in general and looks something like this:

(setq use-package-always-pin "melpa-stable")

(use-package js2-mode
  :ensure t
  :defer  t
  :custom
    (progn (js-indent-level 2)
           (js2-include-node-externs t)))

(use-package kotlin-mode
  :ensure t
  :pin melpa)

So in other words, if I’m on a machine that doesn’t have js2-mode and kotlin-mode installed, use-package will install js2-mode from melpa-stable and kotlin-mode from melpa. So far, so good.

The problem I’m currently running into is that I use several packages that install dependencies if said dependencies are not already installed - for example both elpy and magit depend on a few other packages. From what I can tell so far, installing these packages automatically ends up pulling the dependent packages from melpa rather than melpa-stable, so I end up with a mix of regular and stable packages. While this isn’t a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, I ended up putting together a workaround by using the underlying package managers pinning feature to also pin the dependent packages to melpa-stable where desired. This looks something like this:

(when (boundp 'package-pinned-packages)
  (setq package-pinned-packages
        '((bm                        . "melpa-stable")
          (smex                      . "melpa-stable")
          (pkg-info                  . "melpa-stable")
          (rainbow-delimiters        . "melpa-stable")
          (icicles                   . "melpa")
          (magit-section             . "melpa-stable")
          (git-commit                . "melpa-stable")
          (transient                 . "melpa-stable")
          (use-package               . "melpa-stable")
          (smart-mode-line           . "melpa-stable")
          (smart-mode-line-powerline . "melpa-stable")
          (smart-mode-line-powerline-theme . "melpa-stable")
          (with-editor               . "melpa-stable")
          (dash                      . "melpa-stable")
          (highlight-indentation     . "melpa-stable")
          (pyvenv                    . "melpa-stable")
          (s                         . "melpa-stable")
          (yasnippet                 . "melpa-stable")
          )))

And yes, you’re correct - not all of the packages pinned above are dependencies of other packages, some of them I just haven’t cleaned up or converted to use-package yet.

Anyway, the above works and delivers the desired results, it just feels a little clunky. Does anybody have a recommendation how to achieve the same thing in a slightly more elegant manner?