I'd like to propose the following changes as an intermediate step
toward a more unified handling of the various emacs flavors. Feedback
would be appreciated, especially from the other affected emacs
maintainers.
1) Have all emacs flavors add "Provides: emacsen" to their control
file. It would be nice to just use emacs as the virtual package name
rather than emacsen, but I don't think we can do that and maintain
automatic upgrades. I'm no expert on dpkg upgrade behavior, so I'd be
happy to be corrected. Ideally we'd like to move emacs to be emacs19,
and let emacs be the virtual package name. Perhaps some clever
control files in emacs19 and the new helper package propsed in (4)
could work around this problem. Ideas?
2) Modify all emacsen so that they automatically execute
(debian-run-directory) before sourcing /etc/emacs/site-start.el. A
patch to startup.el for emacs 20 is posted below. A similar hack
should work for emacs 19 and xemacs. This, combined with (4) will let
us remove the run-directory call from site-start.el and then make it a
conffile.
4) Create a new package which all flavors of emacs depend on called
emacsen-common. This package will contain common files and
pre/postinst code that all emacsen need. It will conflict with older
versions of emacs.
This would be a small package, but it will solve some annoying emacsen
package overlap issues. For now, it would become responsible for
/etc/emacs/site-start.{el,d}, debian-rundir.el, 00debian-vars.el, and
in the long run, it would contain the code implementing any
auto-byte-compile scheme we come up with. For now all the elisp code
in emacsen-common would be mandated to be flavor independent.
--- lisp/startup.el~ Fri Sep 19 13:13:44 1997
+++ lisp/startup.el Tue Jan 6 16:11:49 1998
@@ -580,6 +580,10 @@
(run-hooks 'before-init-hook)
+ ;; Load all the debian package snippets.
+ (load "debian-rundir")
+ (debian-run-directory)
+
;; Run the site-start library if it exists. The point of this file is
;; that it is run before .emacs. There is no point in doing this after
;; .emacs; that is useless.
--
Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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