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Install C source code for for debugging help


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Install C source code for for debugging help
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2019 13:37:37 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.1.0

In Bug#37527 I proposed a patch to let builders install a compressed copy of the C source code for Emacs, so that when users type things like 'C-h f car RET' they get a button that takes them to the source code for 'car' instead of giving them a mysterious prompt like "Emacs C source dir: ~/" (which is what I get on Debian).

This patch lets builders choose whether to install the compressed source. The default is to install it, as the filesystem overhead of installing the source code (about 2% of the typical install size) is typically not worth worrying about; plus, there is value in encouraging builders to better follow the free-software principle of making it easy for users to study how Emacs works. Builders can also choose to not install the source, or to have Emacs refer to place where the source was located when Emacs was built (this last approach does not work in typical GNU/Linux distributions, as the build location is not available when Emacs is run).

If you run an uninstalled Emacs, it continues to refer to its C source directory as before.

I'm mentioning this proposed patch on emacs-devel to see whether anyone sees a problem with the idea before I install the patch.



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