Package system improvements!? (was: symbol's value as variable is void: allow-remote-paths)

Looking into this again I realize I must have been very lost the last time I looked at it. The thing is this. When you launch a binary without any packages at all you get an unhelpful "Symbol's value as variable is void: allow-remote-path" message. I then thought erroneously that we had some simple support for download in the core and the first step was to see to that we don't barf on allow-remote-path being undefined and then make the core download work. This isn't the case. There is no core download. You need a few packages to get going. (I knew this but maybe I had a bad dream or something and forgot that ;-() The docs does describe what steps you need to take to bootstrap into a minimal set of packages for starting to use the package system. So the info is there. I haven't really checked that the instructions are good but they can be found. So what about possible basic improvements to the package system!? - Provide some better feed back to a user who starts using the package system without the basic packages installed. The Symbol's values as ... message isn't very helpful. However users who use installers on Windows or other distros will hopefully find that the basic packages are already provided or available to install through other means, eg the installer or the distros package manager. - Provide download capabilities in core such as use libcurl. This would possibly allow a bare binary to download even the basic packages. Ideas? Yours -- %% Mats _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta