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Guidelines for Recipe Authors

An el-get recipe should make code available on the local machine as though it were packaged with Emacs. With very few exceptions, Emacs' own packages:

1. Are loaded only on-demand via autoload
2. Do not make features (such as minor mode and color theme) globally active;
3. Do make features globally available (e.g. via autoloads);
4. Do make features selectively active (e.g., activating a major mode based on filename) when that reflects popular practice.

If a package does not follow these principles "by itself", please try to get the package maintainer to fix that before submitting a recipe that attempts to compensate. If you can't get the package maintainer to make adjustments in a timely fashion, the following compensations in recipes are allowed and encouraged:

1. Major modes can be added to auto-mode-alist for commonly-used, unambigous file patterns.
2. A :pre-init or :post-init may call (autoload ...) "manually"

By default, el-get automatically compiles autoloads for any package written with autoload cookies into a file that's loaded at startup. However, recipes for packages that generate their own autoload files at installation time should disable automatic autoloads and eagerly load that file instead. For example, the nognus recipe contains :autoloads nil and :features gnus-load. Aside from cases like this, there should almost never be a reason to use :features (or, as a last resort, :load).