Re: Another 'best' practices question ??

[Sebastian Tennant <sebyte@smolny.plus.com>]

Quoth Robert Thorpe <rthorpe@realworldtech.com>:
> 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.

There's a reason these directories contain the word 'site', namely
that whatever is found in them is availble site-wide, i.e, to all the
users of your machine.  Consequently adding files to these directories
requires root privileges.

If what you want to 'install' is just for your own personal use then
create a ~/elisp directory, put the source files there, and add
~/.elisp to your load-path.

> 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.

Indeed, there are not.  But it's always possible to do the right
thing, or the wrong one ;-)

Sebastian

P.S. Apologies if I'm missing the point, having not read the thread
     from the beginning.