Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor] wrote:
>>>>>"Stephen" == Stephen J Turnbull
<stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
>>>>>
Stephen> Michael argues (more or less) that XEmacs should have only one ROOT
Stephen> such that the executable is $ROOT/bin/xemacs or $ROOT/src/xemacs, and
Stephen> that the packages hierarchies should be rooted in $ROOT/*-packages for
Stephen> run-in-place, or $ROOT/lib/xemacs/*-packages for an installed XEmacs.
Stephen> This is the admin-centric view.
Not quite: the startup code allows arbitrarily many roots. The
problem is that XEmacs needs to recognize these roots somehow, and in
many installations (say "/usr/local"), they are conflated with a lot
of other software, so it makes some sanity checks to ascertain a
directory is indeed an installation root. Having only the package
hierarchies there presently doesn't qualify.
It's been argued that the sanity checks do the wrong thing, i.e. they
don't recognize legitimate roots. This is probably true, and at the
time I rewrote the code for this, I merely imitated the old behavior.
I've changed it once, but I guess I need to change it again so that
people who have XEmacs roots containing *only* package hierarchies
have an easy way to mark them as such.
If you're in that neighborhood, please allow for this situation.
I have both i686-pc-cygwin and i586-pc-win32 versions and I wish to have the *minimum* of
duplication. Especially, I do not want to have all the lisp plus the packages in two
places.
My tree looks like:
[\CYGWIN]/usr/local <== My --prefix
/bin/i686-pc-cygwin/xemacs [copy or symlink]
/bin/i586-pc-win32/xemacs.exe
/lib/xemacs/etc <== I think because of a quirk in pui
/lisp [empty]
/info
/site-lisp
/site-packages
/xemacs-packages
/lib/xemacs-21.4.6
/i586-pc-win32/ DOC
/ various .exe's
/i686-pc-win32/ DOC
/ exe's
/lisp
/etc, etc, etc
Personally, I'd just as soon move this up to /usr/local/xemacs/xemacs-v.e.r
and leave the /lib/ out of it. But tradition is tradition.
I need an $EMACSPACKAGEPATH for this to work - regretable but I can live with it.
I also have persistant problems with auto-autoloads that are "already loaded."
I've commented on that but I'm told it's a "normal" bug.
The package download system wants to put things in /usr/local/lib/xemacs/pkgname vice.
/usr/local/lib/xemacs-packages/pkgname
so I wind up doing a manual step after each package update - serious pita.
--
David A. Cobb, Software Engineer, Public Access Advocate
"By God's Grace I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner." -- The
Way of a Pilgrim; R. M. French, tr.
Life is too short to tolerate crappy software.
.