Re: Release notes -- package update 1998/09/19
SL Baur <steve(a)xemacs.org> wrote:
*Question for the people who have been coding installation clients:*
The `standards-version' has been held at 1.0, but there is enough of
an interface change, particularly the new existence of a MANIFEST file ,
to warrant changing the version number. Will this help out coding?
Basically, you would know that any package with standards-version 1.0
doesn't have delete information, and anything higher means it does.
It's a "don't care". Yesterday, I mangled the package*.el files
to
allow for deleting the old package installations. I also modified them
to:
* Fall back to deleting the package-specific lisp directory, if the
MANIFEST.* file isn't found. Basically, the MANIFEST.* file is used
if it exists, but, if it doesn't, we still try to do something
reasonable.
* Automatically build a MANIFEST.* file for any package that does not
already have one, when the package is installed.
These changes were made to the low-level package functions, and so this
functionality is available to anything that uses the package* functions
to install packages (and not just the visual package installer).
The one thing I didn't do is provide a nice interface for deleting
packages, in the visual installer or elsewhere (like pull-down menus).
If you want to delete a package, you have to manually do a `M-x
package-get-delete-package' (or somesuch). I'd like to add this and
many other enhancements, but I don't think we should be making such
changes so close to release.
I'll probably be posting the package-delete patches late tonight or
so.
--
Darryl Okahata
darrylo(a)sr.hp.com
DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not
constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Hewlett-Packard, or of the
little green men that have been following him all day.