[AUCTeX-devel] Re: preview-latex 0.9.1 and AUCTeX 11.whatever

[Jan-Åke Larsson]

David Kastrup wrote:
> > Yes. Verily. You do know you are preventing just about anyone else
> > but you from contributing to the configure stuff?
>
> I fail to see that.  EMACS_LISP has straightforward semantics.
> Certainly _much_ easier than all of the shell scripting stuff that is
> constantly causing incompatibilities with various Unix versions,
> quoting problems, and so on.

This is not what I am talking about. I am referring to the addition
of several layers of complication needed to transfer things back and
forth from elisp to shell. I am not enthusiastic about maintaining
this.

> Where does it get unreadable?  [[woozle urg]],[["arg1" "arg2"]]
> transfers the two command line strings arg1 and arg2 into Elisp
> variables woozle and urg.  It does not get any more straightforward
> than that.

It is not unreadable, but would be more readable if the code would
say (let* ((foo (getenv bar))....
instead of just referring to foo and then you find several lines
below what foo contains, hidden in a list of variable names
and another list of values.

> > Hmmmm. How about a "configure.el", to be used for the auto.el
> > (tex-site.el) generation? 
<snip>
> It is also kind of pointless.  If we are doing all the stuff in Emacs
> Lisp, anyway, we might as well do it at runtime and throw away all of
> the configure stuff, leaving only a fixed Makefile.

You were asking for a simpler solution, and I suggested one.

Sure, finding executables should be done at runtime.

But configure sets the install directories. And configure.el would have
our configure options and default locations at hand, something which
would not be available runtime.

Granted, emacs can do all of the installation. But then this would
be a step in that direction. Besides, you are using EMACS_LISP all
the time anyway.

> Yes, that's what has to happen in the long run, anyway, but the
> current goal is just dealing with the current shortcomings.  0.9
> already stopped installing into fancyful places mostly.  0.9.1 should
> find the correct places more often, and also make a better decision
> where multiple possibilities exist.

IMHO 0.9 was a step backward from 0.8.x. If you had asked me at the
time (or given some warning) I would have recommended we keep the
behaviour of 0.8.x until we had an elisp solution. It was not that bad.

/JÅ