[AUCTeX-devel] Unpleasant things...

[David Kastrup]

Hi, taking a look at what tex-mode.el does (and wanting to be
compatible with it), it defines tex-mode and latex-mode with aliases
TeX-mode and LaTeX-mode.

Now if we want to be compatible with tex-mode.el and want to work most
of the stuff using autoload cookies, it would seem reasonable if we
defined TeX-mode and LaTeX-mode and Texinfo-mode and made the
lowercase versions aliases of the uppercase.  It would also mean that
we just use TeX-mode-hook and LaTeX-mode-hook and keep our fingers off
the other hooks, reserving them for tex-mode.el.

It would mean that all our tests for tex-mode and the like would have
to test for TeX-mode instead.

While we are at it, the stupidly named tex-site.el should have to go.
Instead we will feature auctex.el (which can't be confused with the
ancient auc-tex.el).  auctex.el will contain automatically generated
autoloads (except for _both_ upper and lower case TeX mode functions)
and will contain manual (defalias 'tex-mode 'TeX-mode) and manual
autoloads for TeX-mode et al.

This mixture will make it possible to dump AUCTeX into the Emacs tree
and generate autoloads for it without it overriding the default modes
unless "auctex" gets required.

One effect will be that with a site-wide installation of AUCTeX,
people can do (unload-feature 'auctex) in their .emacs to get rid of
it again _completely_.  They can instead use (autoload 'plain-tex-mode
'tex-mode) to get the "classical" plain TeX mode, but normal modes for
everything else.  And so on.  AUCTeX will be installed nicely in
parallel and completely removable for users that really want to get
rid of it again.

And by fixing aliases and autoloads after auctex.el has been loaded,
you can use tex-mode.el just for a few things instead of all.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum