Re: Installing binaries with package.el

["Clément Pit-Claudel" <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>]

On 2017-02-07 02:22, Marcin Borkowski wrote:
> I have no idea, frankly speaking.  AFAIK, pdf-tools does use /some/
> binary, and is installed via package-install (and AFAIR, I didn't have
> to add anything to the $PATH variable) - so there must be some way it
> does it, and that's practically all I know.  (One more thing, I don't
> know whether it's significant, but I have to reinstall it every time
> I compile a new Emacs.  No idea why exactly.)

I see, thanks.  AFAICT, pdf-tools does not install a systel-level binary; it just compiles a C program as part of its installation procedure, and then calls it — but it does not try to expose that binary to the user.  This means among other things that it doesn't need to create files outside of its installation folder, for example.

My case is a bit different.  The binary is just a bash wrapper around an Emacs Lisp program, so I don't have compilation-related issues; I do, however, want my users to be able to call the program easily, which probably means that I want to create binaries outside of my package's installation folder (which in turns has consequences on uninstallation behaviour: deleting the installation folder isn't enough).

Cheers,
Clément.