Re: Adding Emms to ELPA (take 2), and a technical question

[Arthur Miller]

Joost Kremers <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, May 01 2020, Arthur Miller wrote:
>> Joost Kremers <address@hidden> writes:
>>> Honestly, as a user of pdf-tools, I'm glad this happen automatically if I
>>> choose to. Saves me from opening a shell and copy&pasting a bunch of
>>> commands.
>>
>> How would you do it? Get Emacs to install and compile pdf tools from the
>> source, or just to call the package manager from the distribution/OS of
>> choice, which I sure are as many as users here.
>>
>> I am defenetly more happy installing applications through package manager 
>> from
>> my distribution then through Emacs. Mostly because of updates and 
>> dependencies
>> with other applications. Will Emacs also track when those tools are updated,
>> bugs fixed etc?
>>
>> Unless you would to turn Emacs into OS package manager a lá pacman, rpm,
>> etc, which I wouldn't mind by the way, but I don't think Emacs is there.
>>
>> Also pdf-tools are used by other applications in system so it is
>> easy to get them in any distro, inclusive proprietary OS:s(Win,
>> Mac). Why shoujld pdf-tools be different then any other tool we use in
>> Emacs (binutils, compilers, debuggers, grep, ag, you-name-it)?
>
> I'm not quite sure I follow. We're talking about the Emacs package pdf-tools,
> which isn't used by other applications, because, well, it's an Emacs package.
> :-) The pdf-tools package uses a C program called epdfinfo to actually read 
> the
> pdf and feed Emacs all the info it needs to display the pdf file. Epdfinfo is
> part of the pdf-tools package and needs to be compiled before you can use the 
> package in Emacs.
>
> Epdfinfo uses Poppler and in order for it to be built, a number of development
> requirements need to be installed. pdf-tools will try to install these through
> the system package manager, but this, too, can be done manually if you prefer.
>
> So Emacs is not being made into a package manager for .deb or .rpm files, the
> only thing that needs to be compiled is a C program that comes with the 
> package.
Oh, I am sorry, it was too early after my beauty sleep, I should have
waited for more coffee slurps before I engage in any thought process. I
thought you were talking about a "pdftools" a package that comes with
some distros. I don't know why, my mind was in a wrong spot. My bad :-).