Best Practice for generating long term packages

[AronT]

In the Julia documentation it recommends that when creating long term modules, you should use PkgTemplates to generate a new package (instead of Pkg.generate) . The template generate package then gets stored in the .julia/dev directory.

In reading the documentation, it seemed to imply that the dev directory is in the LOAD_PATH and next time you come in, all you need to do is using MyPackage. However, on testing this, that is obviously not the case. I presume I can add that directory to the LOAD_PATH using startup.jl but everywhere on stack exchange, people say “Don’t touch that!!!”

So are people basically recommending “manually push the package when you need it, rather than have all your development packages loaded every time you start a REPL?” It seems convenient to add it to the LOAD_PATH so what is the concern?

On a related note, when I add a package to the environment I get this warning:

 Warning: The active manifest file is an older format with no julia version entry. Dependencies may have been resolved with a different julia version.

Is this because PkgTemplates has not yet been updated for 1.7?

Thanks in advance.

[stevengj]

@AronT

In reading the documentation, it seemed to imply that the dev directory is in the LOAD_PATH and next time you come in, all you need to do is using MyPackage . However, on testing this, that is obviously not the case.

You have to type dev MyPackage at the pkg> prompt.

[AronT]

Nice! Julia package and dependency management are such a pleasure to use, so of course there is a simple way to do this :).

Thanks for the tip @stevengj