>>>> "Andy" == Andy Piper <andyp(a)bea.com>
writes:
Andy> So the problem that we need to avoid is any attempt by
Andy> XEmacs to *access* said path.
Fine. But those checks belong in the low level code. If the OS can't
be relied on to do the checks, work around the problem in the
OS-specific code. In any case we can't prevent users from trying to
access such paths.
> symbol-file is documented to return the file the symbol was
> loaded from, not a file from elsewhere. If that file doesn't
> exist, tough. It's the caller's responsibility to deal with
> that.
Andy> So I'm not sure I agree with the intent of this. An
Andy> installed XEmacs should not have *any* references to the
Andy> build-tree, its ludicrous that it should. It might help your
Andy> personal setup but in general is a bad idea
Why is is a bad idea for XEmacs to keep an accurate audit trail of
what it has loaded?
Andy> and contrary to the ethos that XEmacs has embodied (i.e. not
Andy> being dependent on fixed paths).
There's no _dependency_ on fixed paths here; you can change it any
time you like. Just redump, or even reload the files on the fly.
(Reloading doesn't quite work, since XEmacs compares the strings, not
the truenames. So the originally loaded entries may remain. I think
that should be changed.)
If you want to change the preloaded load-history, that's easy enough
in theory. Arrange for the installer(s) to deliver temacs, not
xemacs, and dump on the install system. Now everybody's happy.
For Unix-like systems with --pdump, already installed with the
standard `make install':
# do the dirty deed in $libexecdir
cd /usr/local/lib/xemacs-21.4.9/i686-pc-linux
# you need the Installation file ...
ln -s /playpen/Projects/XEmacs/Builds/21.4/Installation ../
# ... and the DOC file ...
ln -s i686-pc-linux ../lib-src
# ... and the binary in the right places.
ln -s ../../../bin/xemacs-21.4.9 ./
# now do it to it
./xemacs-21.4.9 -nd -batch -l ../lisp/loadup.el dump
# mv files into place and clean up links and Installation
# overwrites the existing .dmp
mv xemacs.dmp ../../../bin/xemacs-21.4.9-`./xemacs-21.4.9 -sd`.dmp
rm xemacs-21.4.9
cd ..
rm Installation lib-src
Tested on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0.
--
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences
http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things. I don't
have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember. Scott Gilbert c.l.py