Re: XEmacs and its multiuser roots (was Re: change \C-m binding to newline-and-indent)

sb> The XEmacs user base has changed dramatically over the last sb> three years in favor of systems that are typically sb> single-user. HS> How do you know ? I'm sure that Steve meant that the majority of users do so on single-user systems, as you interpret his statement. Of course that's open to question. But I think that you cannot question that the trend is toward single-user installations, even if they do not dominate yet. HS> [packages should be installed by sysadmins] sb> Users have always been encouraged to install their own lisp. HS> That is something that gives any sysadmin the headaches. I HS> have been bitten much to often by having old packages lying HS> around, breaking new clean installs (mailcrypt, VM and bbdb, HS> anybody ?). (As a beta tester since I started using XEmacs, no, I've never been bitten by any of those; I pay attention to the "shadows" report, and have nothing installed in my .xemacs since I'm on a single-user system. But that's neither here not there, except to support:) Sure. We also now have substantially improved tools to handle these problems, such as locate-library and the shadow-finding stuff. If one trusts Michael's opinion (I do, but YMMV; he's never written this explicitly, but I have got this impression from what he has written), the new path algorithms also should make this problem much less problematic, and easier to diagnose. For example, there are a number of these things that bite one; a lot of them are in the FAQ. One could make a package "XEmacs-checkup" which the user could run that looks for things like shadows, prints out installation-string, etc (bug-report already does some of this). One could build tools to enable the sysadmin to easily add his own FAQs to the diagnosis tool (and hopefully report them to c.e.x). The Win95 port introduces an interesting new problem, since most users have write privileges on the system directories. Is that really such a problem? Win95 (and WinNT for that matter in my limited experience) are basically single-user systems. If you go to the trouble making NT into a true multi-user system, then presumably you protect the system directories from J. R. Ewser; ditto shared volumes containing system software. Sysadmins who care and have the smarts to enforce it will use some such system. Then they can take care of J. R. Powawoozer who installs his own packages using the strategies above. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."