[AUCTeX-devel] Re: Setup mess...

[Ralf Angeli]

* David Kastrup (2005-04-13) writes:

> 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.

Hm.  A big deal of the stuff in tex-mik.el and tex-fptex.el are
viewers and related options.  I don't think that these are directly
related to the TeX system.  Especially on X11 you have a plethora of
choices, kdvi, tkdvi, xdvi, acroread, gpdf, xpdf, whatsitsname.  On
Windows in contrast mainly `start' is used to get the system default
for different file types (BTW, we might consider using mailcap or MIME
where it's available).  So for viewers it would probably make more
sense to have an alist of them as well as their command line options
and a variable to select one which is available on the system.

> 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.

Ahem, "some wrappers of our own"?  The custom theme stuff does not
really look like it would be overly simple.  Are you intending to
replicate the functionality or provide a really, really dumbed down
version of it?

> 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?

Currently I have terribly little time and I doubt that this will
change in the near future.  You might have noticed that I am more or
less in small-bug-fixing mode.

I cannot really estimate how much work your or my proposals will
involve.  Throwing out tex-mik.el and tex-fptex.el and using deftheme
sounds rather simple, but writing a backup for Emacsen not providing
it?  And with my proposal, I always have trouble keeping it real.
When I think about viewers I think about auxiliary programs in general
and then I am thinking about connecting them and then I am at a point
where I want to rip out the whole toolchain stuff and write it anew.
So if we go for that we should keep it simple but have an eye on
future additions.

-- 
Ralf