Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: preview-latex 0.9.1 and AUCTeX 11.whatever

[David Kastrup]

Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> writes:

> * David Kastrup (2005-04-01) writes:
>
>> Jan-Åke Larsson <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> It does seem usable. It is just that I've been thinking things
>>> like: "Why do we use 'sed' when we've had emacs up and running
>>> ~four times already" and "Why are we shell-escaping lisp code all
>>> the time when we could just fire up emacs -batch -l foo"
>>
>> If we didn't, then Windows users could not complain about having to
>> install MSYS, and various Unix users would have nothing to complain
>> about what breaks their multitude of shells.  We'd be all out of a
>> job that is fun and rewarding.
>
> As you are supportive of such ideas, why don't we just do that?

Because "just" is a four-letter word.

> It doesn't look particularly hard to rip the Elisp code out of
> aclocal.m4, stick it into some sort of tex-install.el and call it
> from aclocal.m4 with something like `emacs -l tex-install.el -f
> my-funny-function'.

The question really is what it would buy us.  "call it from
aclocal.m4" does not exactly like a recipe that would save Windows
users from installing MSYS.  We still need all components, though we'd
pass the threshold between them at fewer times.  So the basic
complaint seems to be "David, we hate the EMACS_LISP macro".  If it is
the order of arguments that is annoying, this can be changed, of
course.  One problem is that the autoconf framework relies on a lot of
shell variables that are not necessarily exported.  That makes things
like AC_FULL_EXPAND pretty hard to do in Emacs, since it is hard to
determine the information to pass into it.

At the current point of time, we need the kind of glue that autoconf
gives us into the build systems of distributions.  I think we might at
one time duplicate some functionality into a runtime Emacs-Lisp only
installer/configurator, but it would probably not be feasible to
remove it completely.

Anyway, at the moment I am mostly worried about getting 0.9.1
finished, and then we will have to integrate AUCTeX and preview-latex
installation procedures for getting a combined package out.  I don't
think it would make sense to reorganize anything before those changes.
And afterwards, it sounds like something that might be better done on
a branch so as to not impede version turnout.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum