Re: Should Emacs have an upgrade procedure?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:39:52 +0100 Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote: 

LB> 2010/3/21 Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>:
>> On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:41:52 +0100 joakim@verona.se wrote:
>> 
j> Should Emacs have an upgrade procedure?
j> Here's a user story:
>> 
j> - The user has just installed Emacs 24, previously having running
j>   Emacs23
j> - The Emacs splash screen shows a message: "A number of defaults have
j>   been changed between Emacs 23 and 24. Would you like to go through the
j>   changes, or just enable them?". This message is NOT shown if the user
j>   previously had expressed an opinion about these particular defaults.
>> 
>> I think assistant.el (in Gnus) could be used to automate this.

LB> Where is it? What does it do?

Check out Gnus from CVS or:

http://quimby.gnus.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/gnus/lisp/assistant.el

It was written by Lars.  I was going to use it for guided setup for Gnus
users but simply haven't had the time.  It can do almost any dynamic UI
tree with the right setup but needs polish.

See discussions about it here:

http://search.gmane.org/?query=assistant.el&group=gmane.emacs.gnus.general

RMS asked that it be removed from the Emacs trunk but I don't think
there was prejudice in that request, only the reality that the package
is not ready for regular use.  See
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/83364/focus=83452

Ted