Re: Another 'best' practices question ??

[William Case <billlinux@rogers.com>]

Thanks Robert;

This exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.

On Fri, 2007-05-04 at 09:36 -0700, Robert Thorpe wrote:
[snip]
> The normal procedures is to keep the regular Emacs separate from your
> customizations of it.  So, usually you put modes that you have
> downloaded from elsewhere somewhere out of the way of the normal Emacs
> tree.  This allows you to upgrade Emacs more simply.  The normal place
> to put these modes is in "site-lisp".  There are two "site-lisp"
> directories, one in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp is intended for things
> that can work on many versions of emacs.  The one in /usr/share/emacs/
> 22.0.95/site-lisp is intended for things that are there for the
> benefit of that particular version of Emacs.
> 
> A simple mode consisting of a single .el file I would put straight
> into the site-lisp directory.  If the mode consists of many files that
> would make reading the directory confusing then I'd make a new
> directory just to put the mode in.  Then add that dir to the load-path
> in .emacs.  Or, add a line into .emacs to load the main file of the
> mode directly rather than relying on the load-path.
> 
> There are no hard-and-fast rules.

I gather.  

However, this question and your answer are seldom mentioned in
documentation.  They are normally the kind of thing that one picks up
from colleagues.  But when you are retired, working at home, there are
no colleagues to ask.  So your explanation is doubly appreciated.  

I recently went through the SVN manual.  One of the things that made it
a real learner was the authors took the time to write a "best practises"
paragraph or two at the conclusion of major sections.  It's a nice way
to summarize what has been taught previously and to relieve any concern
that a new user might have about looking like an idiot greenhorn the
first time they use a program publicly.


-- 
Regards Bill