Re: [AUCTeX] Install report: Emacs and Windows 98

[Ralf Angeli]

* Harald von Aschen (2005-07-22) writes:

> At 14:48 22.07.05 +0200, Ralf Angeli wrote:
>>
>>What do you mean with "the same problems"?  He did a CVS checkout and
>>you downloaded a snapshot.
>
> Sorry for any inconvenience. I really should have been more exact.
>
> I have also to start with point 6) of his message. Together
>
> GS="F:/Programme/gs/gs8.13/bin/gswin32c.exe" \
>    ./configure --prefix= \
>    F:/Programme/emacs-21.3-fullbin-i386.tar/emacs-21.3 \
>    --with-texmf-dir=f:/Programme/TeXLive/texmf

Looks okay.

> To deal with spaces is not very good so I have decided to do all 
> installations in directories without spaces. And again using "~" was not 
> working in the environmental variable GS.

Path names with spaces should work if you quote them correctly.  The
installation instructions include the following hints:

,----[ (info "(auctex)Installation under MS Windows") ]
|    The installation procedure tries finding stuff in system search paths
| and in Emacs paths.  For that to succeed, you have to use the same
| syntax and spelling and case of paths everywhere: in your system search
| paths, in Emacs' `load-path' variable, as argument to the scripts.  If
| your path names contain spaces or other `shell-unfriendly' characters,
| most notably backslashes for directory separators, place the whole path
| in `"double quote marks"' whenever you specify it on a command line.
| 
|    Avoid `helpful' magic file names like `/cygdrive/c' and
| `C:\PROGRA~1\' like the plague.  It is quite unlikely that the scripts
| will be able to identify the actual file names involved.  Use the full
| paths, making use of normal Windows drive letters like ` 'C:/Program
| Files/Emacs' ' where required, and using the same combination of upper-
| and lowercase letters as in the actual files.  File names containing
| shell-special characters like spaces or backslashes (if you prefer that
| syntax) need to get properly quoted to the shell: the above example
| used single quotes for that.
`----

If this doesn't work, please send a bug report with the command you
were trying and the error message.

>>Based on this information we might be able to improve the installation
>>instructions.  I am currently thinking of adding an "In a Nutshell"
>>section at the start of the installation instructions for Windows.
>>This should merely include a set of instructions working for 90% of
>>Windows systems and spare most people a lot of reading.  I just have
>>to figure out a best-practice layout for the installation.  For
>>example, `prefix' is not well defined on Windows.  A feasible option
>>could be to abuse the Emacs directory for this like some people do.
>
> Hm, what do you mean by "prefix" is not well defined and to abuse the Emacs 
> directory? Do you mean the difference between personal home directory under 
> Unix et. al. and program path under Windows?

No.  On Unix-style operating systems programs mostly don't put their
files in a single directory.  Instead, they put their executables in a
bin/ subdirectory, libraries in lib/, architecture-independent data in
share/, info files in info/, etc.  These subdirectories can appear
more than once at different points in the filesystem hierarchy.  Usual
places are below the /usr or /usr/local directories.  (But you can
create your own directories for this as well.)  One of these
directories can be specified as a prefix for installing a program
which will then put its files into the bin/, share/, info/,
etc. directories below the directory specified as prefix.

Something like this does not exist on Windows.  But the Unix-style
environments for Windows work with something like this.  The funny
thing is that every environment comes with its own hierarchy.  So you
can end up with one for Cygwin, one for MSYS, one for MinGW, one for
GnuWin32 etc.  Of course you can create your own if you make the
programs in those environments aware of the stuff in the tree.  And
then comes Emacs with looks like yet another of those hierarchies in
its Windows incarnation (it has bin/, info/, etc/ ...).

So if you want to install new Unix-style software, where do you put
it?  What is the prefix?

A clean way would be to create your own hierarchy and make the
respective environments aware of executables, libraries, include
files, shared files, etc.  It has the advantage that the installed
programs don't interfere with files under the control of package
systems or some such of the environments, but it may be tedious for
many people carry out the tasks involved.  So they tend to put the
stuff in one of the hierarchies available.

Now, what about AUCTeX?  Putting aside the LaTeX part provided by
preview-latex, it basically installs Elisp and info files.  On
Unix-style systems the Elisp files usually go into something like
/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp and the info files into
/usr/local/info.  (That means the prefix here is /usr/local.)  The
site-lisp/ and info/ directories are available in the Emacs
installation on Windows.  So apart from the AUCTeX installation being
lost once you scrap your Emacs directory, it looks natural (to some
extent) to install AUCTeX into this (pseudo-)tree.

> The only thing I do not have 
> understand fully is the difference between prefix and with-(x)emacs under 
> windows. As in install.windows:
>     `--with-emacs'
>            if you are installing for a version of Emacs.  You can use
>            `--with-emacs=DRIVE:/PATH/TO/EMACS' to specify the name of the
>            installed Emacs executable, complete with its path if
>            necessary (if Emacs is not within a directory specified in
>            your `PATH' environment setting).
>
> And Emacs is not in my search path although ./configure has done it's work 
> only with setting prefix.

The installation routine of AUCTeX explicitely looks for an Emacs
executable below ${prefix}/bin.  I guess for convenience reasons.

> Again as Michael I have to do the TeX calls by hand before my make goes 
> through without an error. I suppose it is the "~" in the filename. Here a 
> snip of my autoexec.bat inserted by TeXLive during installation
>    set PATH=F:\PROGRA~1\TEXLIVE\BIN\WIN32;%PATH%

What is the error message?

> Another hint which might be important for Windows 98 user is the length of 
> the path variable. As far as I can see is the space for an individual 
> environmental variable under Windows XP is 8192 bytes as given here
> http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/ntcmds_shelloverview.mspx
> but under Windows 98 it is not so easy so it has taken me a while to find this
> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;230205
> to increase it if it is necessary (as e.g. here for me). Otherwise my path 
> variable was cut off.

That's a joke, right?

-- 
Ralf