Re: package system: questions, suggestions, alien

More on question 1 & 2 later, or maybe somebody else can answer. While this is not "official" policy, here's my understanding on 3 and 4. Uwe> 3. Version numbers: couldn't the package numbers coincide Uwe> with the version numbers of the maintainer? vm now does :), Uwe> but auctex and others do not. No, they can't _coincide_, in general. VM's author primarily uses XEmacs, and a working XEmacs is the main priority for him. He distributes VM as an XEmacs package. However, packages such as AUC-TeX often need modifications to work with XEmacs. These typically get coordinated with new versions upstream, but in the meantime XEmacs distributes something different from the upstream version. And it often takes a couple of XEmacs releases to get it right. What should be done is to use an "upstream version + XEmacs release" system, but this would require rewriting all the PUI tools. An upgrade path and some degree of backward compatility make this look kind of annoying to write. Someday.... Uwe> 4. May be that has been asked already, but are there plans to Uwe> write a tool, which allows to convert an already compiled Uwe> package to to the xemacs package standard?. I am thinking of Uwe> something equivalent to ALIEN for tgz2rpm. No. It's a bad idea to simply install a precompiled package from somewhere. If the packager is going to take enough care to ensure that the package is going to work right, it's really no more work to checkout the package dependencies, write a very simple Makefile, and build the package as Steve Youngs, the package release engineer, does. The process could be made a lot easier, but we plan to rearrange the package hierarchy so that each package has its own subdirectory under the package hierarchy root with lisp, etc, man, and so on subsubdirectories, instead of the current layout with lisp and other subdirectories under the package root, with package-specific subsubdirectories. That would require rewriting any such tools completely. So this will have to wait for a while. -- 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