bug#11959: 24.1.50; Warning: Lisp directory `C:/Emacs-24-2012-07-16/../site-lisp' does not exist.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Cc: 11959@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2012 19:50:28 -0400
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > It would be easy enough to make sure the site-lisp directories exist
> > before adding them to EMACSLOADPATH on Windows. 
> 
> That's probably the simplest solution.

I will do that, if this is the consensus.  Stefan, Chong, what say
you?

> Or make the install create them, as the POSIX installation does.

The problem happens when you run the uninstalled binary as well.

> Actually, my recommendation would be to stop setting EMACSLOADPATH (and
> the other EMACS* environment variables...) on MS Windows, similar to
> what I recently did for the NS port.

I don't see how this is possible.  Emacs on Windows is built to be
relocatable, because many users install precompiled binaries in any
place they feel like.  So Emacs on Windows must determine its
load-path at run time.  By contrast, the mainline code relies on file
names hardwired into the executable at configure/build time, which is
a non-starter.  What other devices do we have for forcing load-path to
have a specific value, except setting EMACSLOADPATH?  I could, of
course, ifdef away the entire code that does that on lread.c, and put
there a Windows specific code instead, but is that really a better
alternative?

I would encourage to rewrite that code on all platforms to allow
relocation of the binary, since that cannot be bad on any platform.
But until that happens, do you see a better way than set
EMACSLOADPATH?

> > And if we do want to check that, why not exempt the site-lisp
> > directories from the need to exist, like we do in the case where
> > EMACSLOADPATH is not set?
> 
> Because I assumed people setting EMACSLOADPATH would only include
> existing directories, and would want to be warned about missing ones.
> I overlooked that MS Windows adds site-lisp directories without checking
> they exist. Also there's no clean way to detect what a site-lisp
> directory is in the EMACSLOADPATH case (simply checking for site-lisp in
> the name is not robust).

Checking for site-lisp is better than nothing, though.