>>>>> "Ben" == Ben Wing <ben(a)666.com> writes:
Ben> "Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]" wrote:
>> >>>>> "Ben" == Ben Wing <ben(a)666.com> writes:
>>
Ben> Michael, why are you making this so hard? *if* you're running in
Ben> place, and *if* you can't find the packages, and *if* there's a
Ben> valid tree parallel to the root, then use it. In your case, if
Ben> the tree found is not a valid package hierarchy, then it should
Ben> be ignored.
>>
>> OK guys, I give up. Apparently both sides don't like what I do. Ben,
>> please finally get it into your head that the issues surrounding path
>> searching are *hard*, and there are very few changes that you can make
>> which won't screw some of the users. At least give someone else the
>> benefit of the expertise here, come by the hard way.
Ben> i believe you in general, but in this case i simply don't see why it's so
Ben> hard to add a last-resort fallback! the alternative in this case would be
Ben> no packages at all!
Look at the code: Package path searching is just an instance of the
general startup-path-searching machinery. The big advantage of this
is that all startup paths are found the same way, which makes the code
very adaptable and maintainable. I really very much dislike
special-casing this code. Also, experience shows that someone will
have set up their package tree so that the new machinery will not find
it, and the bug will then be very hard to find.
I'll try to zip up the code I have soon and mail it in, so you can
look at it.
--
Cheers =8-} Chipsy
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla
