Unload a whole package or library tree

Question

Sometimes I want to call unload-feature to unload a library… and it a library depends on it… and another library depends on that library…

How can I unload a library and all the libraries that depends on it, without walking through the dependency tree manually?

A common use case is to unload all the libraries of a package (e.g. when upgrading or uninstalling), so if there's a way to do that, it would be good enough.

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 27 '17 at 21:16

3

There's no built-in way to do this--see Unloading in the Elisp manual.

unload-feature takes a force argument that allows forcibly unloading P even if other packages depend on P; is that sufficient for your needs?

If not, you can try to create a recursive version of unload-feature containing:

(let* ((file (feature-file feature))
       (dependents (delete file (copy-sequence (file-dependents file))))) 
  (when dependents
    (mapc #'unload-feature-recursive (mapcan #'file-provides dependents))))

edited Feb 27 '17 at 21:16

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

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answered Feb 27 '17 at 20:42

Tianxiang Xiong

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Thanks, I fixed the error in the question. Writing a recursive version of `unload-feature` was the point of the question. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 27 '17 at 21:18

Unload a whole package or library tree

1 Answers1