Re: printing.el v6.6.3

[Vinicius Jose Latorre]

> > From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> > Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 06:17:58 -0700 (MST)
> > 
> > pr-dosify-path actually operates on file names.  But I think the job
> > it does is no longer considered desirable; it should probably be
> > eliminated, not renamed.  The same for pr-unixify-path.  Eli,
> > what do you think?
> 
> pr-dosify-path is certainly not required for file names passed to
> Emacs primitives.  But it might be required if the resultant file
> name is passed to an external program: if that program doesn't grok
> Unix-style forward slashes, it will choke.  (DOS and Windows system
> calls do support forward slashes, but if an application parses its
> command line, it could reject Unix-style file names if the programmer
> didn't make allowances for forward slashes.)
> 
> It is hard for me to see what exactly are the results of
> pr-dosify-path used for, but I'm certain Vinicius will know ;-)

As I wrote in previous email, it's due to file name arguments for Windows
commands.


> > However, I have to question the usefulness of the whole pr-path-alist
> > feature.  Many Emacs packages find commands to run.  Normally they
> > find these commands either through $PATH or through variables that
> > specify the command name (which can be a file name) to do a certain
> > job.
> > 
> > It seems to me that there is no particular reason to add this new
> > mechanism for printing commands alone.
> 
> I agree.  I'm guessing that this feature was motivated by the fact
> that there are no standard directories on Windows systems where you
> could expect programs like Ghostscript to be installed.  But it
> should be enough to let users specify a full file name to their
> Ghostscript executable via defcustom.

It was also motivated by tentative of minimizing variable maintenance between
several plataforms.


> > If we do add a hairy method for finding commands, we should add it for
> > all of Emacs, and integrate it with Custom.
> 
> We could simply add a feature that adds directories to exec-path, or
> something like that.