Re: Software/HD ecology

[Anil Trivedi <anil@null.invalid>]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> As maintainers, it's in our own interest to keep things uncluttered,
> so we strive to find some logic to things such that we can organize our
> files and keep files in their logical place...I don't claim that the current
> arrangement is perfect, but it takes time and energy to think about how 
> to make it better and to fix the various places where things aren't 
> consistent and logical, so help is most welcome.

Kai Großjohann wrote:

> Writing these few extra lines is a LOT of work. Most important of all, it's 
> not clear what to delete.  There would be *endless* arguments about which 
> files to remove and which files to keep.  Emacs consists of 2297 files (on 
> my system), it's very difficult to untangle dependencies on them.

I would like to offer a few general suggestions for any large program,
not just emacs.

First of all, you should have a clear idea as to which files are needed
to complie the program but not to run it later, and which ones will be
needed forever to run the program. It is a sorry state of affairs if
the creators and maintainers themselves don't know the "dpendencies";
that indicates serious future troubles and the sooner one starts
correcting the situation the better.

1. You need "clean" and "distclean" to recover from failed compile
attempts. I think most programs do have this. (Personally, I might just
re-open the .tar file and start over.)

2. Once the program compiles, and works fine, the user should be able
to delete all files that were needed in compiling but will not be
needed in running it, or in uninstalling it.

3. Finally, should the user decide that this is not his kind of progam,
there should be an uninstall option that does safely and cleanly remove
everything. He should not have to go around checking in various bin,
share, libexec, man, lib, doc directories, etc., and guessing just
which files might belong to the program he wants to delete.

This seeme to be a minimum framework for responsible software
distribution.

4. As for languages, this is an early stage in globalization and the
"bloat" is perhaps manageable, but in a few years we may see support
for hundreds of languages and dozens of scripts. We would need to
enable a user to select what he needs and skip the rest.

Anil Trivedi