Re: Emacs Installer for MS Windows

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

> I agree that the packaging and user-preferences basically should be
> separated. But it is also important to make a more easy road to emacs for an
> ms windows user. To turn on all these things above are options at the
> installation (except for gnuserv and the printing, see below).

There are also W32 users who've learned Emacs before and who e.g. don't want
CUA-mode.  I understand your desire, and I think the best way to do that is
to have an installation option to install a "vanilla Emacs" or "Emacs with
w32 tweaks".  I think it's important to make it clear that it's not quite
"plain vanilla Emacs" for reasons of bug-reporting and things like that.

> I think that gnuserv always should be installed.  Since I am only using ms
> windows (I have never time to switch to Linux) I am not sure how it looks on
> other platforms.  I believe I read that gnuserv is included there (or
> something similar).  Is that correct?

I think adding gnuserv is fine, since it replaces the missing
emacsclient/emacsserver (of course, what should really happen is that we
should get emacscliant/emacsserver working on w32 so you don't need to add
gnuserv, but in the mean time it's a good workaround).

[ I don't know enough about w32 printing to comment on your suggestion. ]

>> let's say I start your Emacs and see "gee he turned on CUA-mode, that
> sucks
>> for me".  What do I do?  Normally, to turn CUA off, a user should do
>> (CUA-mode -1) or you use custom.  Your site-start.el or default.el changes
>> should correctly react to either one of those things.

> I turn on the options just as if the user had used "Options - Customize
> Emacs" so I do not believe it is a problem.

Huh?  How do you do that?  If you call custom-set-variables in site-start.el
or default.el, it won't be the same as if you called it in .emacs because
the user has no way to change those settings AFAIK.  Have you tried it?
Actually maybe it works from site-start.el?
Have you also tried the case where the user uses (CUA-mode -1) instead
of using customize?
Note also that if you call custom-set-variables, if the user subsequently
does a custom-save, it will put a duplicate of your custom-set-variables
into her .emacs (because Emacs doesn't know that those settings were not
originally made from .emacs).

Incidentally, isn't this a case where a custom theme could advantageously
be used?


        Stefan