Re: Adding Emms to ELPA (take 2), and a technical question

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>]

On Fri, May 01 2020, Arthur Miller wrote:
> Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm> writes:
>> Honestly, as a user of pdf-tools, I'm glad this happen 
>> automatically if I choose to. Saves me from opening a shell and 
>> copy&pasting a bunch of commands.
>
> How would you do it? Get Emacs to install and compile pdf tools 
> from the source, or just to call the package manager from the 
> distribution/OS of choice, which I sure are as many as users 
> here.
>
> I am defenetly more happy installing applications through 
> package manager from my distribution then through Emacs. Mostly 
> because of updates and dependencies with other applications. 
> Will Emacs also track when those tools are updated, bugs fixed 
> etc?
>
> Unless you would to turn Emacs into OS package manager a lá 
> pacman, rpm,
> etc, which I wouldn't mind by the way, but I don't think Emacs 
> is there.
>
> Also pdf-tools are used by other applications in system so it is
> easy to get them in any distro, inclusive proprietary OS:s(Win,
> Mac). Why shoujld pdf-tools be different then any other tool we 
> use in
> Emacs (binutils, compilers, debuggers, grep, ag, you-name-it)?

I'm not quite sure I follow. We're talking about the Emacs package 
pdf-tools, which isn't used by other applications, because, well, 
it's an Emacs package. :-) The pdf-tools package uses a C program 
called epdfinfo to actually read the pdf and feed Emacs all the 
info it needs to display the pdf file. Epdfinfo is part of the 
pdf-tools package and needs to be compiled before you can use the 
package in Emacs.

Epdfinfo uses Poppler and in order for it to be built, a number of 
development requirements need to be installed. pdf-tools will try 
to install these through the system package manager, but this, 
too, can be done manually if you prefer.

So Emacs is not being made into a package manager for .deb or .rpm 
files, the only thing that needs to be compiled is a C program 
that comes with the package.

-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments