Re: installing emacs and X11 on OS X

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>]

On 27 Oct 2002, Thomas F. Burdick wrote:

> This doesn't let me differentiate between Carbon-Emacs on OS X, and
> X11-Emacs on the same OS.  system-type is darwin on both, and
> display-graphic-p is t on both.  However, it makes a lot of sense (to
> me) that someone might want to make the Carbon one behave more like a
> Carbon application, and the X11 one behave like an X11 application.

If there's a difference between these two configurations, there should be 
a way to distinguish between them.  Doesn't system-configuration fit the 
bill? or maybe system-configuration-options?

> Out of curiosity, why is it depricated?  Because people abuse it where
> specific feature tests would be better?

Yes.  And that makes application code, including users' .emacs, bitrot 
alot when functionality of some window-system changes due to 
development.  I already mentioned the problem with .emacs files that 
assumed window-system being nil means no colors.

> If so, that seems like a bad
> reason ... people can abuse anything

People will abuse less if they have less opportunities for abuse.

> but AFAIK, window-system is the
> only way to determine what window system you're on.

A small study into the uses of window-system in Emacs's own code that we 
did shows that it is used to test for a small number of features, but those 
features are implicit: they are neither stated clearly in the code nor 
even clearly understood in some cases.  So it seems like window-system is 
a powerful tool for obfuscating Lisp code.

By contrast, the explicit predicates such as display-multi-font-p 
actually say exactly what is the feature that's being tested.  And the 
maintenance effort needed to keep a small number of predicates in sync 
with Emacs development is much less than what would be needed to go 
through all the *.el files and modify them whenever some window-system 
gets an extra feature it didn't have before.  As an example, consider a 
future development of drop-down menus on a character terminal.

> Or is there a
> plan to replace this with a more competant introspection api?

Such a plan is already in place: those are the display-*-p predicates 
advertized by NEWS in the same item which says window-system should not 
be used.

> [ It would be cool to be able to have something like a window-system-p
>   function, so I could ask (window-system-p 'carbon) or
>   (window-system-p 'x11) or (window-system-p 'gtk).

I think system-configuration and/or system-configuration-options should 
allow you to do this.