Re: Package paths and relocatable binary kits

Michael, On 12/23/05, Michael Sperber <sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de&gt; wrote: Thanks for your help. I should have mentioned that, based on your earlier suggestions I had previously tried to make `paths-find-emacs-root' return a list. At that time, I came across an error like this one during dumping: Loading e:\acs\software\src\xemacs-21.4-2005-12-23\lisp\dump-paths.el...*** Error in XEmacs initialization (wrong-type-argument stringp ("e:\\acs\\software\\src\\xemacs-21.4-2005-12-23\\")) *** Backtrace really-early-error-handler((wrong-type-argument stringp ("e:\\acs\\software\\src\\xemacs-21.4-2005-12-23\\"))) file-name-as-directory(("e:\\acs\\software\\src\\xemacs-21.4-2005-12-23\\")) (concat (file-name-as-directory root) suffix base) (expand-file-name (concat (file-name-as-directory root) suffix base)) (file-name-as-directory (expand-file-name (concat ... suffix base))) # bind (base suffix root) paths-construct-emacs-directory(("e:\\acs\\software\\src\\xemacs-21.4-2005-12-23\\") "lib\\xemacs-21.4.18\\" "lisp") (let ((path ...)) (if (paths-file-readable-directory-p path) (throw ... path))) # bind (root) Based on your encouragement, this time I investigated further and figured out that `paths-find-emacs-roots' was returning a list whose first element was a list. dump-paths.el and `normal-top-level' in startup.el (which call `paths-find-emacs-roots') could not handle that complexity, so I hacked together a fix to flatten out the list at the end of `paths-find-emacs-roots' and voila, the code works. My hack doesn't feel like a particularly good lisp-y approach, so I would be grateful for any help you or anyone else could offer. Here's what I did: at the end of `paths-find-emacs-roots' I changed the code from returning this form: - (paths-filter #'paths-emacs-root-p potential-installation-roots))) - (paths-uniq-append invocation-roots - installation-roots))) to this: + (paths-filter #'paths-emacs-root-p potential-installation-roots)) + (maybe-not-flat (paths-uniq-append + invocation-roots + installation-roots))) + ; flatten the list and return it + (if (listp (car maybe-not-flat)) + (nconc (car maybe-not-flat) (nthcdr 1 maybe-not-flat)) + maybe-not-flat))) It seems to me that the real problem is that `paths-uniq-append' does not flatten the list it returns and it would be better to fix things there, I think. Patches gratefully accepted. One other comment, searching further up in the hierarchy was not necessary, so I removed `maybe-root-4' from your sample code, and I changed `maybe-root-3' to point to ../../XEmacs. This is the directory that config.inc.samp defaults package installation to under Windows. The complete patch is attached. Please look this over and send me your comments. Thanks for your help. Regards, Vin -- Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Mary Oliver