Re: simple useful functions

[Stefan Monnier]

>> - I fail to see in which circumstance(s) this is useful.
> OK, I see this may not be useful for everybody.

That's not necessarily a problem, tho.  Most packages in Emacs are not
useful for everybody, after all.  Still, it needs to be useful to more
than a handful; and, more importantly, it should provide a clear
functionality in a "generic" way (this is what is likely to make it
useful to more than a handful of users).

> The reason I wrote this command was to support embedded software
> development.  In embedded development work we are usually required to
> use some cross compilation tools.  Such tools often come with a setup
> script which includes setting up necessary environment variables for
> command paths and library paths.

IIUC these scripts are written for /bin/sh, right?  How do (t)csh users
handle that?
[ Sorry, I'm not that familiar with cross-compiling: OpenWRT is about
  as far as I got into this, and it "takes care of things" in ways
  I haven't tried to understand.  They don't use such setup scripts, at
  least in a user-visible way (although the user does perform the
  cross-compiling).  ]

> In order to compile software in this environment from Emacs I need to
> start Emacs from the shell that has run the script.  But to me Emacs
> is not a text editor but a working environment.

I partly understand the context.  But right here I think your script
fails to serve you: it uses `setenv' which affects all inferior
processes, so if you're working on several projects at the same time
from the same Emacs session (likely if you're using it as a work
environment, which is also the intended use to a large extent), you get
pollution from one project to the other.  I think this issue is
important, and I suspect that figuring out how it should be solved is
necessary to figure out what is a good/generic way to provide this
"source" feature.


        Stefan