Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition

Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition

[Thorsten]

Hello, though not an Emacs developer I have an suggestion to make: why
not outfactor all elisp-libraries that are platform independent to a
Dropbox folder (eventually using elpa for this folder), and than share
this folder (read only) with anybody interested?  The core part of emacs
could be compiled for all the major platforms, and the emacs developers
make sure that the core and the libraries are always in consistent state
and work out of the box.

Then having the identical work emacs environment i.e. on Win 7 and
Ubuntu would only involve to install the Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition, that
is the absolute minimal platform dependent core, and to put a symlink as
.emacs.d to the dropbox folder in your home folder on your diffenrent
machines.

This shared Dropbox folder would have a smart file structure with one
init.el that has all the requiere's (to be commented out), a subfolder
site-lisp with all the 'vendors' libraries, and a subfolder
my-customisations with one user customisation file per library, i.e. it
looks like after emacs bancrupsy is declared, not like before (with one
giant .emacs.el).

So _all_ the configuration and _all_ .el or .elc files are in the
Dropbox folder and therefore valid without change on all my machines,
and the smart emacs developers make sure that only relative links to the
filesystem are used, that work on Windows and Linux.  No more hours and
days in trying to emulate i.e. my emacs latex environment on my linux PC
on my win 7 notebook, only to start over from scratch when updating
hardware or software.

That would take a huge burden from emacs users, and I guess the Dropbox
guys would like to have many emacs users as clients. Since its all tiny
textfiles, the free 10GB on Dropbox will most likely suffice.

I hope this suggestion is not embarrassing in its ignorance. Its born
out of much pain in trying to not only share my work and configuration
files via Dropbox, but to have "the same emacs" on my Win7 machine as on
my Ubuntu machine.

Cheers Thorsten
    
        

Re: Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition

[Davis Herring]

> Hello, though not an Emacs developer I have an suggestion to make: why
> not outfactor all elisp-libraries that are platform independent to a
> Dropbox folder (eventually using elpa for this folder), and than share
> this folder (read only) with anybody interested?  The core part of emacs
> could be compiled for all the major platforms, and the emacs developers
> make sure that the core and the libraries are always in consistent state
> and work out of the box.

Having Dropbox able to invisibly and automatically run code on thousands
(millions?) of users' machines doesn't seem like a good idea.  I think
Richard in particular is opposed to the execution of code not under the
user's control (for those security reasons but also for the freedom of
editing).

> Ubuntu would only involve to install the Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition, that

(You probably mean Emacs 24, here and in the subject.)

Davis

-- 
This product is sold by volume, not by mass.  If it appears too dense or
too sparse, it is because mass-energy conversion has occurred during
shipping.

Re: Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition

[Stefan Monnier]

> Then having the identical work emacs environment i.e. on Win 7 and
> Ubuntu would only involve to install the Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition, that

You can just share your .emacs.d directory instead, with any number of
Free tools, without having to resort to proprietary programs
like Dropbox.


        Stefan

Re: Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition

[Jambunathan K]

Thorsten <gruenderteam.berlin@googlemail.com> writes:

> Hello, though not an Emacs developer I have an suggestion to make: why
> not outfactor all elisp-libraries that are platform independent to a
> Dropbox folder (eventually using elpa for this folder), and than share
> this folder (read only) with anybody interested?  The core part of emacs
> could be compiled for all the major platforms, and the emacs developers
> make sure that the core and the libraries are always in consistent state
> and work out of the box.
>
> Then having the identical work emacs environment i.e. on Win 7 and
> Ubuntu would only involve to install the Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition, that
> is the absolute minimal platform dependent core, and to put a symlink as
> .emacs.d to the dropbox folder in your home folder on your diffenrent
> machines.
>
> This shared Dropbox folder would have a smart file structure with one
> init.el that has all the requiere's (to be commented out), a subfolder
> site-lisp with all the 'vendors' libraries, and a subfolder
> my-customisations with one user customisation file per library, i.e. it
> looks like after emacs bancrupsy is declared, not like before (with one
> giant .emacs.el).
>
> So _all_ the configuration and _all_ .el or .elc files are in the
> Dropbox folder and therefore valid without change on all my machines,
> and the smart emacs developers make sure that only relative links to the
> filesystem are used, that work on Windows and Linux.  No more hours and
> days in trying to emulate i.e. my emacs latex environment on my linux PC
> on my win 7 notebook, only to start over from scratch when updating
> hardware or software.
>
> That would take a huge burden from emacs users, and I guess the Dropbox
> guys would like to have many emacs users as clients. Since its all tiny
> textfiles, the free 10GB on Dropbox will most likely suffice.
>
> I hope this suggestion is not embarrassing in its ignorance. Its born
> out of much pain in trying to not only share my work and configuration
> files via Dropbox, but to have "the same emacs" on my Win7 machine as on
> my Ubuntu machine.

Adding my 2 cents here.

I wonder whether the recent support for creating themes - which is a
`drop box' for bunch of related custom variables - would come in handy,
to atleast address a part of the configuration requirements.

I believe there could be instances where a `drop box' might need some
sort of init code that goes beyond just setting some custom
variables. May be custom themes can be extended to include associating
some sort of init code as well ...

I recently split my .emacs - I felt that gnus and org configuration were
slightly growing day by day. It is during this process that I happened
to discover initsplit.el. In some sense, initsplit.el is a `drop box'
organized around groups - as in `gnus group' or `org group'.

Jambunathan K.

>
> Cheers Thorsten
>     
>         

Re: Emacs 24 Dropbox Edition

[Thorsten]

"Davis Herring" <herring@lanl.gov> writes:
 
> Having Dropbox able to invisibly and automatically run code on
> thousands (millions?) of users' machines doesn't seem like a good
> idea.  I think Richard in particular is opposed to the execution of
> code not under the user's control (for those security reasons but also
> for the freedom of editing).

It's a matter of trust, of course. It seems that in the Orgmode
community Dropbox is quite popular. Maybe the same idea could be
realized via GitHub, with the slight inconvience that Updates are not
automatic.

> (You probably mean Emacs 24, here and in the subject.)

yes, Emacs 24 ... sorry

Thorsten

Re: Emacs 24 Dropbox Edition

[Thorsten]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> Then having the identical work emacs environment i.e. on Win 7 and
>> Ubuntu would only involve to install the Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition,
>> that
>
> You can just share your .emacs.d directory instead, with any number of
> Free tools, without having to resort to proprietary programs like
> Dropbox.

I don't really care if it's Dropbox or something else (GitHub), as long
as it works. The problem that I wanted to address is, thats its a lot of
work to have the 'same emacs' with uptodate libraries on several
machines with different OS, and that each emacs user has to do this work
for himself (and again if he buys a new machine).  Wouldn't it be easier
to extract the minimum platformspecific emacs-core for Windows, Linux
etc _once_ and have no other libraries installed with it, but give
access to one online (elpa-managed ?)  library repository that has the
latest stable version of all libraries that are now distributed with
emacs (sometimes a bit outdated) and as many of the libraries available
all over the internet as possible (but only those that have been tested
to work together).

And that shared library-directory already has a set of well organized
configuration files, worked out by the experienced emacs developers, so
the only thing I have to do is clone the (read-only) library-directory
to my personnel online directory, uncomment several (require 'foo)
expressions and checkout the directory on all my machines - and it works
out of the box.

Re: Emacs 24 Dropbox Edition

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Tue, 08 Feb 2011 07:15:50 +0100 Thorsten <gruenderteam.berlin@googlemail.com> wrote: 

T> It's a matter of trust, of course. It seems that in the Orgmode
T> community Dropbox is quite popular. Maybe the same idea could be
T> realized via GitHub, with the slight inconvience that Updates are not
T> automatic.

I wouldn't trust GitHub or Dropbox to do this job.  They are fine
services but their business plan doesn't involve Emacs.

The premise that you need Dropbox to distribute files efficiently is, I
think, not accurate.  A web server like elpa.gnu.org is just as good.
There are many techniques for distributing web server load but I think
we're very far from that need.

The hard part so far has been getting copyright assignments for packages
(which I've only been marginally helping) and debating whether they
belong on elpa.gnu.org or inside Emacs itself.  Actually putting the
package up on elpa.gnu.org is trivial.

Ted

Re: Emacs 24 Dropbox Edition

[Leo]

On 2011-02-08 22:24 +0800, Ted Zlatanov wrote:
> The hard part so far has been getting copyright assignments for
> packages (which I've only been marginally helping) and debating
> whether they belong on elpa.gnu.org or inside Emacs itself. Actually
> putting the package up on elpa.gnu.org is trivial.

I think all files that are not preloaded belong there, ideally. It makes
it easy for rolling out bug-fix updates.

Leo

-- 
Oracle is the new evil

Re: Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition

[Dimitri Fontaine]

Thorsten <gruenderteam.berlin@googlemail.com> writes:
> Hello, though not an Emacs developer I have an suggestion to make: why
> not outfactor all elisp-libraries that are platform independent to a
> Dropbox folder (eventually using elpa for this folder), and than share
> this folder (read only) with anybody interested?  The core part of emacs

You might be interrested into el-get:

  https://github.com/dimitri/el-get

  http://tapoueh.org/articles/news/_el-get_reaches_1.0.html
  http://tapoueh.org/articles/news/_Starting_afresh_with_el-get.html

Regards,
-- 
dim

Re: Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition

[Thorsten]

Thanks, el-get is quite close to what I was looking for, and the
motivations behind the development of el-get reflect well my experiences
with configuring emacs for several machines.  I think I should not have
mentioned Dropbox. 
My question really was, if there will be an emacs
release for all plattforms that is only the minimal core and makes it
possible to do all the library management and configuration only once
for all machines in some online repository, using tools like el-get.  It
would be very nice, if after purchasing a new computer (with a different
platform) the only thing to do would be the installation of the platform
dependent emacs core. All elisp libraries and the configuration files
would be accessed through the online repository. If the necesary
external software dependencies (e.g. w3m) would be downloaded
automagically too by a tool like maven, many emacs users would save a
lot of time and energy. 
 Regards Thorsten