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To: XEmacs Developers <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org>
Subject: Re: Packages: what to do?
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From: Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>
Date: 15 Sep 1997 19:14:06 +0200
In-Reply-To: Colin Rafferty's message of "15 Sep 1997 12:54:19 -0400"
Message-ID: <kigvi02ts81.fsf@jagor.srce.hr>
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Colin Rafferty <craffert@ml.com> writes:

> > What I really want to do is to add a package, as a "normal" user,
> > without rebuilding XEmacs.  Is that possible?
> 
> Not really.

That is bad bad bad...  I think every user should be able to import
his/her packages.  For instance:

(package-add-packages "~/xemacs-packages")

This would push `~/xemacs-packages' to package-path, as well as load
the autoloads from there.  Is there a reason why this wouldn't be
feasible?  Steve?

> The third thing that should happen (in my opinion), but does not happen,
> is that any directory on the load-path that has an auto-autoload.el(c)
> file that has not been dumped, should be loaded.  This is what you were
> expecting, but did not get.

Err, no.  This still relies too much on the non-user part.  What I
would like to see is that I, as a person who *use* XEmacs (as opposing
to the person who *installs* it) can add my own package.  Of course,
XEmacs startup will be a wee bit slower, as those autoloads aren't
preloaded, but it doesn't matter.

As Martin once said, much GNU software makes the mistake of
hard-coding too many things at run-time.  We mustn't make the same
mistake.

> I would like to be able to drop packages into ~/.xemacs, and have them
> autoloaded automatically.  The problem is, when do we load the
> auto-autoload files from my ~/.xemacs?

See above.

> However, once loaded, it is difficult to undo this operation.  Maybe
> there should be a way for a user to specify a different package-path.
> But if he does, what happens to the pre-dumped stuff?

No user should be able to remove packages from package-path (too hard
to implement), but he should definitely be able to add them.

-- 
Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia
--------------------------------+--------------------------------
Idle RAM is the Devil's playground.

