Re: [AUCTeX] Install report: Emacs and Windows 98

[David Kastrup]

Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> writes:

> * David Kastrup (2005-07-23) writes:
>
>> Well, if it is, it is an old joke.  It's been told at least since
>> MSDOS 3.3 (?), probably quite earlier.
>
> What's the reason for something like this?  Didn't they have the
> possibility to dynamically allocate more space for a string (or char
> array respectively) back then?

We are talking about boxes with 16kB of memory or similar here.
command.com more often than not was not kept in memory when programs
were executing, so environment variables were part of a special
resident memory block.  Allocating them inside of the regular
command.com heap would have defeated the purpose of unloading
command.com.

>> So the question is how we pass on the joke...
>
> * Document the problem and the given solution.
> * Don't use PATH for finding executables.  Okay this is pretty much
>   out of question since both the shell used for installation as well
>   as Emacs rely on it.
>
> BTW, some file variables (like `TeX-lisp-directory') in tex-site.el
> are already computed dynamically.  If all were computed like this, we
> could probably provide a pre-built version of AUCTeX for Windows users
> which would only have to be extracted into an existing Emacs tree.  No
> downloading of MSYS, no configuring, no building.  That'd be quite
> convenient.  Or did I miss something?

gswin32c, but that's nothing that one could not put into tex-mik.el or
tex-fptex.el if necessary.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum