Re: Correct Paths to Emacs C Sources after Installation

[Stefan Monnier]

> I happen to disagree, I'd say 99% of Emacs users have no clue how to build
> it.  Many (probably most?) Linux distributions serve prebuilt packages.
> MSYS2 on Windows serve prebuilt packages through pacman (package manager
> ported from Arch Linux) as well.  Cygwin serves prebuilt packages.  I provide
> standalone Emacs builds for Windows too.  Furthermore, Eli told me recently
> that sources should be included (either separately or in the same archive)
> anyway to be compliant with the license.

The only relevant comparison is "built locally" with "the user installed
a precompiled package and then fetched the sources".  So users who don't
have the source are not relevant.

>> Can you give "typical examples" where (expand-file-name "../src/emacs"
>> invocation-directory) will give the right result?
> Would you agree that this is *at least* more reasonable default in many
> cases than hard coding nonexistent directory?

*If* the current value points to an non-existing directory and if
../src/emacs points to an existing directory, then yes, it's probably
a better default.  The question is whether it'd happen often enough to
justify the corresponding code.

> Last but not least, in many package managers there are options to install
> sources separately from binaries and by convention they are usually
> installed under corresponding "src/<package-name>" suffix. This again
> proves that my proposed default is more reasonable than a hard coded path
> to some random directory.

I'm not debating whether it's reasonable or not.  I never said it was
not reasonable.  I just would like to see some concrete examples where
"../src/emacs" would work.

I do think it's important to make it easier to jump to the sources
(which is why I wrote the code that adds the "C source" button).
Another approach is to leave the default value of source-directory alone
and instead change the behavior of the "C source" button so that (if
source-directory doesn't exist) it tries a bunch of alternative
directories.  Yet another option is to offer to actually download the
code (or visit it straight from the Git repository via the URL package).
Prebuilt packages (such as Debian's) could tweak the code to offer to
install the corresponding source package.


        Stefan


PS: Side note: the right way to propose such a change is to submit it
via M-x report-emacs-bug.