Re: `make' written in elisp

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

BTW, I'm going to be out of town for a week, so any further responses
will be delayed.

>>>>> "Stefan" == Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

    Stefan> What I was talking about is things like latex-preview
    Stefan> searching for some LaTeX files.  This is not done at
    Stefan> startup: it is currently done at install time, and I was
    Stefan> arguing about that it should be done when latex-preview is
    Stefan> loaded.  Of course it may also take too much time,

That's my point.  People are just not going to find that acceptable,
at least they didn't with year 2000 hardware with XEmacs.  Even if
it's done while you're getting morning coffee---because it will take
longer than that.  Waiting for it to load every time you reload AUCTeX
will wear out the AUCTeX developers.

    Stefan> So [XEmacs packaging is] similar to `install' in this
    Stefan> sense, except that you require a Makefile to describe
    Stefan> where the various files are located.  That sounds like a
    Stefan> good way to do it (tho for `install', it would make more
    Stefan> sense to use a .el file for that info since `install' does
    Stefan> the job of `make' for typical simple packages).

Agreed.

    >> There is one point that needs to be mentioned, however, and
    >> that is that for complex packages that depend on other
    >> packages, the "calling macros from byte-compiled code" kind of
    >> bug has dropped from FAQ to fossil status.

    Stefan> So there is some amount of version-dependency checking
    Stefan> now?

No.  These are package dependencies, not version dependencies.  If a
package uses macros from another one, it is placed in the "REQUIRES"
make variable.  Then the libraries from those REQUIRE'd packages are
preloaded using the -l argument to emacs.

Theoretically these could be autogenerated, but the dependency
trackers we've seen so far have all been buggy, and miss more
dependencies than when doing it by hand.

    Stefan> Remember, `install' aims for simplicity and tries as much
    Stefan> as possible to stick to what a real user would manually
    Stefan> do.

Sure.  I don't think XEmacs will change its commitment to a more
sophisticated ("intrusive and inflexible" if you prefer :-) packaging
system.  I think we should be able to achieve interoperability in most
cases though.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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