updating packages
Lynn David Newton writes:
Although it apparently works right that way, it strikes me as
philosophically wrong and broken to go into /usr-land and start
changing ownerships and permissions.
I don't see a problem with that on a single-user machine, where the
purpose of root is to protect *your* distribution-installed software
from user errors, not *somebody else's* system from your misbehavior.
Isn't there or shouldn't there be a way for the elisp to
detect
that when a directory tree exists but is unwritable
Yes, of course.
it almost certainly means that it needs to be updated by root,
It's not obvious that that is always the right thing. For example, a
user with access to privilege might have aggressive beta-testing
settings in their personal account, which would be inappropriate for
their production (system) XEmacs.
and so should prompt for a password?
I don't think that's true. Rather, you should install your private
XEmacs packages somewhere that you can update them. That might be
/usr/local owned by your everyday user, or it might be in
$HOME/{bin,etc,lib,share}.
What XEmacs should do is make this easier to configure and install.
In any case, to actually accomplish this prompt for a password thing
you'd need to use TRAMP, or invoke a sub-XEmacs from an inferior
shell. Too complex, I think.
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