Re: Emacs setup assistants

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> > From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
> > Date: 20 May 2004 09:25:23 +0200
> > 
> > > So there is a more general question: why not extend Customize
> > > for a guided tour through options?
> > 
> > Because it does not lend itself to writing?  For Texinfo, we have
> > modes that facilitate getting a nice, human-manageable document
> > source.  We don't have that for some weird stuff of Lisp functions.
> 
> Do we really need an elaborate authoring support in this case?

Yes.  Installation assistants have to reflect the views of the
learner, not of the person immersed into programming.  And we also
want to have natural language versions of those.

If the format is basically text, we'll get people to particate in
translation and writing.  Few people bother about correcting
ambiguous wording of DOC strings (which feel like they are the realm
of specialists) in the middle of obscure Lisp code.  The necessity
for hand-formatting your DOC strings alone constantly keeps focus of
the real work.  We really don't want to completely abandon Emacs'
support for conveniently writing texts when the task is writing texts.

> A tool such as the one being discussed needs mostly small chinks of
> plain text interspersed with hyperlinks, something for which
> Customize (and indeed even Help functions) already have the
> necessary infrastructure, or at least large parts of it.

Small? No.  An assistant has to _explain_ things, and the ways in
which they are related.  Isolated customization strings don't do that.
You don't get a coherent explanation and layout of what to do in what
order and what influences what.  You get a twisty little maze of
crosslinks with pieces of information scattered around, and the
coherent ideas of the design having no place to be sitting.

That's not what an assistant is supposed to do: an assistant is
concerned with setting up a package, not with customizing a single
variable once you have found out that you might want to customize
_that_ variable.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum