[AUCTeX-devel] Setup mess...

[David Kastrup]

Hi, I am currently fighting with the startup of AUCTeX.

The basic setup for preview-latex consists of one preferably
autoloaded file that then sets up paths to the rest.

Our current setup with tex-site.el, tex-mik.el, fptex.el does not
really match that.  Those are optionally loaded files.  This does not
really cut it.

I propose that we scrap that scheme and replace it as follows:
tex-site.el is removed.  Its name is misleading, as it does not
contain site customizations.  Instead we have auctex.el which contains
all necessary autoloads (which we should autogenerate!) to make AUCTeX
work.

In addition we have a variable TeX-default-scheme which can be set to
'miktex, 'fptex or 'tetex, maybe 'texlive and which determines the
default settings.

When Emacs-22 is used, I think we should use "deftheme" for this: this
functionality is exactly what is needed, and it is also important for
other things like "newbie defaults", "MacOSX defaults", "Windows
defaults".  Currently it is heavily underdocumented and pretty much
unused.  I think it would be very beneficial to both AUCTeX as well as
Emacs in the long run if we tried to push this more into the
mainstream.  We'll obviously need backup code for Emacs-21 and XEmacs,
but probably we can make do with some wrappers of our own.

Ok, kill me.

Now this seems like the right thing to do.  However, I also have the
problem that I need to get a workshop-able AUCTeX (including
preview-latex) by the end of the month.

Is it reasonable to get this working before that?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum