Re: Software/HD ecology

[kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann)]

Ajanta <ajanta@no.spam> writes:

> Actually I don't understand this equivalence. Makefiles routinely come
> with targets like "clean" which presumably deletes files like .log/.o
> and of course "install".  If they could have a few extra targets, like
> "superclean" or "EnglishOnly", that's a few extra lines. Why is that
> comparable with the clutter of tens of MB and 100's of files scattered
> around?

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.

Let me give a simple example: some Linux distributions normally
install the *.elc files only and put the *.el files into an extra
package (*.rpm in the case of SuSE and Redhat), because the *.el files
are not needed for running Emacs.  (*.el files contain the source
code, and *.elc files are something like `object code' that's created
by `compiling' the *.el files.)

Then the ask how to send mail, and I tell them to type M-x
finder-commentary RET smtpmail RET.  This command prints some
documentation which is extracted from the beginning of the file
smtpmail.el.

But they don't have that file installed!

So, even the simple idea of `people don't want to look at the source
code, people just want to run the resulting binary' has failed!

(In an ideal world, there would be additional documentation for
smtpmail, outside the .el file.  But the world is not perfect, and
the documentation you get with M-x finder-commentary RET smtpmail RET
is quite adequate for setting it up, so nobody has ever bothered to
do anything about it.)

That said, XEmacs has the so-called package system which is a very
nifty thing indeed.  You install a base package of XEmacs which can
do almost nothing at all, and then you start installing XEmacs
packages which contain the Lisp code for various things.  It's very
easy this way to upgrade the packages that you have installed.

But then, a lot of XEmacs users install the Sumo tarball I think
which just contains all available packages :-)  (Caveat: I'm not an
XEmacs user, so what do I know what `a lot of XEmacs users' do!)
-- 
~/.signature is: umop ap!sdn    (Frank Nobis)