Re: package system: questions, suggestions, alien

MT> Create a new idea called a DISTRIBUTION, where it is the CORE MT> plus the bootstrapping packages. SY> This is something that we are considering. I'm not sure how SY> far along things are though. SY> Steve T: What's the status on this? If you like I can channel SY> some of my time towards getting something working. I probably would not work on it for a couple months, I guess, but I would certainly help if somebody else takes the lead. The basic idea is simple: put a tarball of xemacs-base+EFS, alternatively the current SUMOs, in $srcdir/etc. Write a Lisp program to put the contents in "the expected place" using the path-finding routines Michael has designed. Add makefile targets for invoking the Lisp program to unpack the bootstrap package or the SUMO(s), and probably some routines to drop the admin directly into PUI (this makes sense even if you install the SUMO(s)). Some of the stuff you would have to vet anyway: the bootstrap package should be automatically generated, I think, and maybe kept as a separate module in CVS. Building it probably would require something in your build scripts similar to the SUMO but only for the minimal set. Possibly there need to be changes to PUI (mostly sanity-checking where the package-base file goes and stuff). I think it would be trivial to add the code to my script to roll these into the xemacs tarballs. The bootstrap package would become part of the standard xemacs-$version.tar.gz and xemacs-$version-src.tar.gz, both the regular and Mule SUMOs would be in a new tarball xemacs-$version-sumo.tar.gz. (Or maybe I should do as Martin always advocated and the +SUMO tarball would be xemacs-$version.tar.gz, the bootstrap tarball would be xemacs-$version-bootstrap.tar.gz.) -- 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