I tend to be a pretty conservative Emacs user. I generally don’t run beta versions and try to keep my packages up to date without constant upgrading. To be sure, some folks are much more conservative in that they save their old packages and don’t update either Emacs or their packages frequently.
I used to be much more aggressive about updating packages until an Org update completely broke my workflow. After that I tried to be a bit more circumspect. I was, therefore, interested in this post by Mario Jason Braganza about his plan for updating his packages. Braganza is much more paranoid than I am and for a long time didn’t update his packages at all. The problem with that strategy is that sooner or later the packages would break when he upgraded Emacs. To solve that problem, he devised a new package upgrade plan.
His plan is simple:
- Upgrade packages only once a quarter
- Before upgrading, stop the Emacs server, and backup the Emacs folder
- Update the packages
- Start Emacs manually and test the changes
- If everything is working restart the server and continue, otherwise revert the backup file, restart the server, and continue
That seems like a pretty good plan to me. I like the idea of backing up at least the elpa subdirectory before upgrading and I think a quarterly upgrade schedule makes a lot of sense. Unless you’re having problems with a package there’s probably no need to install every update.