Lakeyosemit asks an interesting question on the Emacs reddit. He says he and his team collaborate using literate programming and reproducible research with Emacs and Org mode. Recently, they’ve encountered a problem where certain experiments weren’t reproducible by all team members because different versions of Emacs and packages were being used. Lakeyosemit asks how can he keep the Emacs and package versions in sync across the team?
First off, I really love that they’re using Emacs/Org to do their work using reproducible research and literate programming. It might be a little more work for individual team members setting up a new experiment but it will certainly ease the workflow of the team. Not all teams are working on collaborative projects for which this makes sense but if you are this methodology is a winner.
I’ll let you read the responses. There are several useful suggestions including using use-package to pin packages to a certain repositories be they MELPA Stable or a local repository. No one really addressed the issue of keeping Emacs in sync but that seems to me to be pretty easy. The updates are infrequent and you can just tell everyone that you’ll be updating in two weeks. You’d probably want to make sure the new version didn’t break any before announcing an update though.