Re: Compile Mode and "host" Emacs

[Jorgen Schaefer]

On Wed, 30 Oct 2013 13:43:31 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Sebastian Wiesner writes:
> 
>  > > Sorry, I don't follow.  If asking your users to temporarily add
>  > > something to their initialization files is an option, why not:
>  > >
>  > > (setenv "EMACS_EXE_PATH"
>  > >         (file-truename (concat (file-name-as-directory
>  > >                                  invocation-directory)
>  > >                                  invocation-name)))
>  > 
>  > See, I can ask them, or better, "advise" them, but I can't actually
>  > rely upon them, can I?  There is still a chance that the user lacks
>  > this setting, or (even worse) has it wrong, isn't there?
> 
> Yes.  However, if your users all use an organizationally-supplied
> Emacs as you imply, you can put it in site-start.el in your
> distribution.  Inhibiting site-start.el is rather uncommon, so this
> should do the trick for you.

One use case Sebastian has in mind is mine. One of my Emacs packages is
being tested on 24.1, 24.2, 24.3 and trunk. I have all four Emacsen
installed. I run all my unit tests in all of those. Thanks to cask, none
of those share installed packages so I test an actual use environment,
not my own environment. Not even cask is installed in those. When I find
a bug, I start the respective Emacs and see what is causing it. "emacs"
runs trunk, "emacs-24.1" runs that one, etc.

From within that Emacs, I then run programs such as ert-testrunner
which use Emacs to run automated tests. It's impossible for these
programs to tell which Emacs I am currently using, even though the
information is trivially accessible to Emacs itself. This is not
impossible to work around (I simply manually set EMACS, I also could
manually set EMACS_EXE_PATH or whatever), but it would be nice if the
information was more easily available.

Regards,
Jorgen