Re: [ELPA] New package xeft.el

[Yuan Fu]

> On Jan 6, 2023, at 8:21 AM, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> 
>> Yeah I can do that.  The download feature is probably over-engineering
>> for not much benefit :-)
> 
> It's beneficial for those who don't have a local C/C++ compiler.
> With the requirements of native compilation, this may become less of an
> issue, but still, it's something that's been requested fairly often
> (mostly by package maintainers rather than by users, admittedly, but
> still).
> 
>>> Other details I saw along the way:
>>> - You claim you have precompiled packages for GNU/Linux but that's only
>>> true for amd64, which is only a particular subset of GNU/Linux
>>> (most of my GNU/Linux machines (i386, armhf, arm64) are outside of
>>> that subset, for example).
>> That’s true, probably better to not have the download feature.
> 
> At the same time amd4 covers probably the vast majority of users.
> 
> Maybe elpa.gnu.org could be used to host precompiled binaries.
> Our Free Software ideals tell us we should expose the source code as
> much as possible so I think "download binary" should be an alternative
> to "compile the source" rather than to "download the source", so the
> first point is to include the source code in the ELPA package.
> 
> We may even be able to make elpa.gnu.org generate precompiled binaries
> for armhf, i386, and arm64 (it's fairly easy to install those
> cross-compilation tools under Debian).  But this won't happen until
> someone writes the code for that.
> 
>>> - Your source code includes `emacs-module.h` which should not be
>>> necessary because that file is distributed with Emacs (the way `pq`
>>> finds it is not ideal, but this might be a good opportunity to look
>>> at improving the situation and providing a standardized way for
>>> ELisp packages to find that file).
>> 
>> Is it included in the distributed Emacs?
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> I thought you would need the source of Emacs to access that file.
> 
> No, `make install` copies it to a "sane" place.
> But I don't (yet?) know how to reliably find that place from the running 
> Emacs.

Even if you can, I’d say ideally you want to be able to compile a dynamic 
module without a running Emacs.

I:
- added copyright notice to xapian-lite.cc
- added xapian-lite.cc (and friends) to the source repository of xeft, so the 
user can compile the dynamic module (xapian-lite) without downloading the 
source of it.
- didn’t do anything about emacs-module.h.
- changed the wording of some prompts of the compile/download process

Yuan