Finder and packages.

----- Beginning of the official part ----- Description Finder is a small elisp package that keeps descriptions of other elisp packages, installed in the system State of art Current implementation of finder is inherited from GNU Emacs and does not match XEmacs's package scheme. Namely, finder keeps all information in one file which is created during xemacs building and after adding new packages one must regenerate this file to keep it in sync with changes. There are elisp functions in current implementation of finder that rebuild finder database, but they require write access to xemacs distribution lisp/ directory. More over, finder rebuilding scheme rebuilds finder database from scratch, what leads to reparsing many elisp files. (All files, found in load path). Proposal I propose to use distributed database like custom and autoloads do. Finder database for each package should be generated as a part of package building process. On user request finder should look through package tree and collect all package-related databases in one database in memory. Affects Finder Finder should be partially rewritten. Current finder implementation does not allow distributed database. XEmacs building process XEmacs should build finder database for lisp files that go within XEmacs distribution. XEmacs packages building process Package-local database should be generated during package building. ----- End of the official part ----- I have reiplemented finder to generate package-local finder database and pick up these databases on user request. I have split finder.el into two files: finder.el -- code to generate finder-inf.el finder-load.el -- code to pick things up and show to user As for XEmacs building it seems that no changes needed. Makefile references only `finder-compile-keywords-quiet' and `finder-compile-keywords'. Both are still there. But ideologically it is more correct to use new functionality xemacs -batch -l finder -f batch-make-finder-index Now packages. Proposed functionality is new but might be pretty well implemented like auto-autoloads code. It requires adding new target to GENERATED: finder-inf.el. Command to build it: cd package-lisp-dir; xemacs -batch -l finder -f batch-make-finder-index If you are interested, have a look at the sources at: http://www.ispras.ru/~npak/xemacs/finder/finder.el http://www.ispras.ru/~npak/xemacs/finder/finder-load.el If you are still interested, then I'll keep on hacking it's user interface. I plan to add navigation buttons a-la custom. Nick.