Re: Correct Paths to Emacs C Sources after Installation

[Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>]

Alexander Shukaev writes:

> Did you delete the build directory?

No, i didn't. In contrast to yourself, i don't usually delete my build
directories, because i might need to rebuild with some slight
modifications; deleting everything would result in the entire build
being done from scratch, often (from my point of view) unnecessarily.

> Furthermore, I just don't get what exactly you don't understand. Do
> you realize that the default `source-directory` is hard coded to the
> path where Emacs sources were when you built them? You cannot relocate
> them now without either manually changing the value of this variable
> through Emacs Lisp or rebuilding Emacs from scratch so that the
> default changes. This poses a major difficulty when distributing Emacs
> as a prebuilt package, since on the developer machine sources would be
> located on some directory which does not even exists for end
> users. How many more times should I repeat that issue?

Well, my apologies; i got confused because, even though your original
post implied (to me) that the packaging issue was your primary concern,
in a subsequent post you mentioned both the packaging issue /and/ the
case where you yourself were compiling - but i then overlooked the fact
that you delete your build directories. Sorry!

i'm not one of the Emacs maintainers, myself, but i would think this is
something that needs to be decided by those who package Emacs. Not all
those packaging Emacs have end-users who want or need the C sources to
be available, so from the point of view of such packagers, including the
sources in the package would make it unnecessarily large. Furthermore,
different platforms (e.g. different Linux distros) might differ in where
such C sources should be located in their filesystem hierarchy
(e.g. they might have chosen /usr/src/ as the standard location for C
sources). So it seems to me it might be best for the Emacs build system
to not make decisions best left to package maintainers.


Alexis.