Re: package.el

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Davis" == Davis Herring <address@hidden> writes:

Davis> This (the customizable setting) has been discussed before[1],
Davis> and I even offered to go find all the hardcoded ~/.emacs.d/
Davis> usages, but there wasn't much evident interest.  Is there now,
Davis> especially given the issue of differing standards among OSes?

Ah, cool.  I wasn't aware of this.

Today I made a quick pass over Emacs to fix this.  I haven't tested my
patch yet, since I ran into a few difficulties:

* xterm.c uses ~/.emacs.d:

          char *file = "~/.emacs.d/gtkrc";

  I'm not familiar with Emacs internals but I would guess this is run
  before .emacs -- so I don't see how the user could customize this...?
  But for the Aquamacs case I suppose this doesn't matter.

* emacsclient.c:

          sprintf (path, "%s/.emacs.d/server/%s", home, server_file);

  We'd need an environment variable or command line argument here.
  Also some -- but not all -- of the Emacs lisp code uses _emacs_d on
  'ms-dos.  Is this different from Windows?  Does emacsclient work on
  ms-dos?  (If so then the code looks incorrect...)

* Lots of places hard-code .emacs.d, some use _emacs_d, and one uses
  convert-standard-filename.  My patch uses option #2 but maybe
  convert-standard-filename is better?

* I wasn't sure what to do about the doc strings and the Texinfo.
  Should they all mention `user-emacs-directory'?  Or just leave them
  as-is, mentioning ~.emacs.d/, and let the reader figure it out?

* More trivially, what :group should the new user-emacs-directory
  defcustom be in?

Anyway I am happy to send the patch to anybody interested.  And I'm
going to do a bit of testing of it "soon" :)

Tom