Could ELPA packages be enabled maybe?

[jave]

I wanted to solve "run-length-encoding" using the PEG parser in peg.el, which in ELPA.

So I wanted this to work:
(package-initialize)
(package-install 'peg) (require 'peg)

but the code errors out, perhaps on some network security condition, but it wasn't immediately apparent why.

I understand that it would be quite easy to do RLE without PEG, but it would be fun to enable some package exploration in the exercises.

[SleeplessByte]

Hi there @jave ,

Indeed, the test-runner doesn't have network, meaning that all the packages we allow must be preloaded (and cannot be installed before a test run). For this reason, unless absolutely necessary, we generally don't include packages.

However, we could add a note to the exercise that it's interesting to try to solve this outside of exercise using that package. What do you think?

[jave]

Some thoughts:

• AFAICS it is not possible to publish a solution that doesnt pass the test-runner, even though the solution passes locally. It could be an interesting addition to be able to flag the solution as working locally, and still publish it.

• A note regarding solving with PEG would have to follow some kind of general template for such notes I think, since the same would go for any exercise, finding an interesting package to explore within the scope of the exercise

• There are upstream attempts at including more packages from ELPA in the core emacs distribution, and when that happens one could push for particular packages to be included