Re: [ELPA-diffs] /srv/bzr/emacs/elpa r312: Update AUCTeX ELPA package to the new 11.87 release.

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org> writes:

> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
> Hi Stefan,
>
> I've added the auctex-devel list to the Cc.
>
>>> Do you have a better idea?
>>
>> Use elpa/packages/auctex as the official upstream.
>>
>>> We are planning to migrate to some DVCS anytime soon, but since
>>> AUCTeX is expected to work with all Emacs versions >= 21.x plus
>>> XEmacs >= 21.4.x, there's no way to develop it only as a part of
>>> emacs in its bzr repo, although that would be very nice from a
>>> maintenance point of view.
>>
>> I don't see what prevents it.  AFAICT it still contains all the
>> backward compatibility code that's in CVS and nobody asked to remove
>> it.  If there are a couple more xemacs-specific files, I have no
>> objection to you adding them.
>
> I'd welcome this but David and Ralf are more qualified to judge about
> feasibility.  Especially, there's much complexity in auctex's build
> system in order to compile XEmacs packages, and that's a bit more than
> just an auctex-compat.el.

The XEmacs package building is sort of an aggravation.  An XEmacs
package contains all necessary files plus info source files in a rigid
directory layout, possibly not unsimilar to what ELPA or any other
package would do.

Now XEmacs will only distribute package files that have been assembled
by XEmacs tools in the XEmacs package tree.  So the XEmacs packages that
AUCTeX provides will work fine, but you'll have to find, download and
install them manually instead of relying on the XEmacs packaging system.

What will be provided in the XEmacs package repositories consequently is
something massaged manually to the necessary layout, commonly with
mistakes and several years behind.

So it is not clear to me who the customers for the XEmacs packages we
compile actually are.  Smart people, most likely.  XEmacs itself
boycotts our packaging efforts since we don't arrive at the right layout
in the canonical way.

The XEmacs compatibility code in the Lisp files itself is peanuts in
comparison.  No point in removing that as far as I can see.  However,
preview-latex has a somewhat more extensive compatibility setup.  It
would be arguable not to place the prv-xemacs.el files in the ELPA
packaging at least.  Removing it from the source distribution would be
seriously unfair since it is technically complex enough that starting it
from scratch would be quite hard: that would be several man-months at
least from an experienced XEmacs programmer, and there are none as far
as I can see interested in AUCTeX.

>> The only remaining problem I can imagine is for those few files which
>> aren't FSF-copyright and hence aren't in the ELPA package, but IIUC
>> these are obsoletish and could just be dropped (noone complained
>> about them missing from the ELPA version).
>
> Yes, these 5 or 6 files are only addons for some special latex styles.
> They are not important for auctex, and they could be dropped or easily
> rewritten by someone else with CA by just looking at the corresponding
> latex style but not the current code.

Also possible to go assignment-shopping for them once again.

-- 
David Kastrup