Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: Repository for RefTeX

[Stefan Monnier]

>> One point of note: install.el is meant to be included in Emacs to help
>> install external packages (it would then be supplemented with a package
>> manager that could list the installed packages, select which ones to
>> (de)activate, deinstall, etc..).  I.e. it's not meant to be specific to any
>> particular package.

> Comments in the file mention that it failed to find documentation of
> AUCTeX due to it being in a directory named `doc'.

Actually, IIRC, the main problem is that the file doesn't have the ".info"
extension, so the only way for install.el to guess the name of the Info file
is if it's in a directory called `info' (but that fallback strategy is
rather undesirable).

> That can probably be remedied in install.el.

Yes, of course.  The original intention was to make install.el work
out-of-the-box with "any" sane tarball, but it turns out that there's too
much ambiguity even in relatively sane tarballs, so I've since changed
opinion and consider that install.el shouldn't try too hard to guess what's
going on and instead rely on a special meta-descriptive file in the tarball
meant specifically for install.el.

> Are there any other culprits we should
> avoid, especially regarding the directory layout of the sources?  The
> proposed layout for RefTeX is this (without files generated for a dist
> tarball):

> reftex/CHANGES
> reftex/COPYING
> reftex/ChangeLog
> reftex/INSTALL
> reftex/Makefile
> reftex/README
> reftex/lisp/Makefile
> reftex/lisp/lpath.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-auc.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-cite.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-dcr.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-global.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-index.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-parse.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-ref.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-sel.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-toc.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex-vars.el
> reftex/lisp/reftex.el
> reftex/doc/Makefile
> reftex/doc/reftex.texi

That looks OK.  If install.el does its job properly it will
- untar this into the user's elisp repository (~/lib/emacs or ~/share/emacs
  if I were to choose).
- build the .elc and .info files.
- construct a "autoloads" file that contains the relevant autoloads, as well
  as commands to adjust load-path and Info-directory-path.
- add a line in the user's .emacs to load this autoloads file.

The first 3 steps are the installation proper.  The last step is
the activation.  This separation is important in case the installation is
made by the sysadmin into /usr/local/lib/emacs.  The separation is also
important in case you want to install several different versions of
a package (since usually only one of those versions can be loaded in
a given Emacs session at a time).


        Stefan