Re: Finder and packages.

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