doc for 3rd pkg

[Uwe Brauer]

On 28 Aug 2004, stephen at xemacs.org wrote:

>>>>>> "Uwe" == Uwe Brauer <oub at gmx.net> writes:
>
> Uwe> The documentation I found so far in the xemacs web site
> Uwe> concerns mostly information for official pkg, is there any
> Uwe> 3rd party pkg information which is available?
>
> AUCTeX is an official package.  What makes you think it isn't?


That is a misunderstanding:

I plan to add a binball target  for the auctex distribution, such that
users can create  their own pkg tar   ball and install  it  in the 3rd
party directory, locally or globally. I am using most of the Makefile
and XEmacs.rules Christoph Wedler used, when he created x-symbol as a
3rd party Xemacs pkg.

This way Xemacs users  can test recent  auctex versions (which are not
released as official  pkg, either because  the release is still buggy,
as  it  seems to be  the   case right now, or    the Xemacs pkg auctex
maintainer is slow, which happened in the past.)
>
> All of the issues of "official" vs. "unofficial" come down to the
> problem of "it has to be in the XEmacs CVS repository, or it very
> likely will build incorrectly".  The problems you are going to run
> into are in adapting it to the XEmacs package build system, but
> these occur for packages that were historically in the XEmacs tree,
> as well.  They're just more likely to occur for packages that are
> maintained by third parties who maintain their own build systems,
> because GNU Emacs refuses to set a standard for them, and has
> rejected our offer of XEmacs's system (on at least three occasions).

One of the problems I encounter is of course the configure
system. Auctex uses for a while now Makefile.in and configure so I
have to think how to include the binball target in the Makefile.in,
which at the moment I cannot due to my lack of knowledge of the
configure syntaxis.
>
> The right way to handle this is exactly as you're doing: ask the
> core people, especially Steve Y, Norbert, and Ville Skyttä.
>
> If you want to do others a favor, keep track of the problems you are
> encountering and summarize them and their solutions to xemacs-beta.
> Preferably in TexInfo, so we can add them to the existing
> documentation.
Ok