Context

Recently I was trying to reproduce a bug with citeproc.el and org-mode in emacs.

I thought I could use package-vc-install to install a set of upstream emacs packages at fixed versions, and thereby let citeproc upstream test in the same environment as I have.

It turns out that getting emacs to load the non-builtin version of org via package-vc-install did not work because

• org-mode needs to run make after cloning
• once package.el was initialized, I always seemed to end up with the built in org-mode (yeah, I realize that isn't an explanation).

Recipe part 1: get org

Here you can replace 9.8.7 with any other tagged release

  EMACSHOME=$(mktemp -d)
  git clone https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/org-mode ${EMACSHOME}/org
  git -C ${EMACSHOME}/org reset --hard release_9.8.7 
  make -C ${EMACSHOME}/org autoloads
  emacs -Q --batch -L ${EMACSHOME}/org/lisp --eval "(progn (require 'org) (message (org-version)))"

This should print 9.8.7, not the version of built in org-mode.

Recipe part 2: add-on packages

Now to test some add-on packages, run

    emacs -Q --init-directory ${EMACSHOME} -L ${EMACSHOME}/org/lisp

  (progn
    (require 'org)
    (package-initialize)
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/emacs-straight/queue")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/joostkremers/parsebib" "6.7")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/rejeep/f.el" "0.21.0")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/magnars/s.el" "1.13.0")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/akicho8/string-inflection" "1.0.16")
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/andras-simonyi/citeproc-el" "0.9.5"))

You can then run your tests in that emacs right away, or restart the environment with

  emacs -Q --init-directory ${EMACSHOME} -L ${EMACSHOME}/org/lisp