Re: Emacs Installer for MS Windows

[Stefan Monnier]

>> As Stefan has pointed out to me this will only affect the user that is
>> installing Emacs.  However I think that is no big problem on ms windows.

I think that's only acceptable if there's no good way to do The Right Thing.

> (customize-set-value 'custom-var "custom value")
> ...
> (customize-save-customized)

Yes, that's better.  But the problem is still here: this will only affect
the current user, and (worse) this will modify his .emacs, potentially
throwing away some of his own customizations.

My take on it is to create a site-start.el (or default.el) file which does
something along the lines of:

(unless (file-exists-p "~/.emacs")
  (customize-set-value 'custom-var1 "custom value1")
  (customize-set-value 'custom-var2 "custom value2")
  (customize-set-value 'custom-var3 "custom value3"))

This way, if the user already has a .emacs, nothing happens.
And if she every changes something via customize, the settings will be added
to her .emacs so those settings will apply to any Emacs (which is a good
thing: you want to be able to move your .emacs from one place to another,
including from w32 to unix and vice-versa).


        Stefan