Re: [Patch21.5] Find a relative package root at runtime

vin> 1) The user shall be able to choose where the installed files vin> go. My question is how flexible is this going to be? On Unix we still have people who care about "share" vs "lib". As far as I can tell, that's not true on Windows, so there's no harm in insisting that there be a single XEmacs root under which you can find all of XEmacs's system files, presumably grouped into version-specific core installations and (a) package installation(s). I think it's enough to allow the user to choose that root. Under that, the installation should allow multiple installations of both core and package distributions (presumably rare, but see below for a use case), but in fixed relative positions. vin> 2) Multiple installations shll be able to share package vin> installations. (I would prefer to do this without requiring vin> EMACSPACKAGEPATH, which will be an install/documentation vin> encumbrance.) vin> These requirements are why I want to install into (by default): vin> C:\Program Files\XEmacs vin> XEmacs-21.4.19 vin> XEmacs-21.5-b25 vin> mule-packages vin> site-packages vin> xemacs-packages I'd put in an additional level for packages, so that people could have C:\Program Files\XEmacs XEmacs-21.4.19 # what goes here? like this? etc i386-windows-nt info lisp XEmacs-21.5-b25 Lisp Packages mule-packages site-packages xemacs-packages Prerelease Packages mule-packages site-packages xemacs-packages where the package hierarchies under "Lisp Packages" would be found by default without special configuration or environment variables. Then everybody else must use something like EARLYPACKAGES="%HOME%\.xemacs;C:\Program Files\XEmacs\Prerelease Packages" (whatever the proper syntax is) to get an instance with prerelease packages in the path. (Of course AFAIK PUI doesn't support this kind of thing yet, but it would be nice if it did.) -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.