Re: Updating the GNU ELPA package of AucTeX

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> It is not clear to me why the act of importing a runnable version of
>> AUCTeX into ELPA should be precluded from running a Makefile rule.  It
>> is not like ELPA can directly access git repositories and extract
>> whatever it wants, so the import will always involve explicit steps.

Yes, GNU ELPA can and does "git pull" every day as part of its
automatic procedure.

> The new Git ELPA could have the savannah auctex repository as a
> submodule, so there wouldn't be two individual auctex repositories that
> need to me synchronized manually.

That's the intention, indeed (tho not technically as a Git submodule,
but morally equivalent).

>>> By omitting preview, that would be solved, too.
>> preview-latex is an integral part of AUCTeX by now.

I tend to agree with this.  I'm not sure of the potential
technical/documentation problems, but in terms of user expectation
I definitely want preview-latex to be installed when you install auctex.

> Stefan said that the additional auctex/preview/ directory was a problem
> for the ELPA build procedure, so I suggested to have the ELPA auctex
> package not contain it (the directory would still exist in the ELPA
> auctex git submodule).  Then we could possibly have a separate
> preview-latex ELPA package by just symlinking packages/preview-latex to
> packages/auctex/preview/.  So I actually don't propose to rip preview
> out of auctex, just to split it into two ELPA packages in order to cope
> with the simplistic ELPA build procedure.

I'd be OK with splitting auctex into 2 packages, but does preview-latex
work without auctex?  If not, that means we'd need to put the
dependencies in the "wrong" direction (i.e. users wouldn't automatically
get preview-latex when they install auctex).

It seems simpler to do the "mv preview/* ./; rmdir preview".


        Stefan