Re: Correct Paths to Emacs C Sources after Installation

[Alexander Shukaev]

>
> This is done under the assumption that a common case is when Emacs was
> built locally.  And I think it's more common for Emacs to be built
> locally, compared to the situation where the user installed
> a precompiled package and then fetched the sources.


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.

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? There were plenty of examples
like relocating/deleting sources from original location where they were
during build or moving to different machine with prebuilt Emacs (for
instance on UFD) or distributing it as prebuilt package to other users. I
don't know what other "more" convincing examples you want to find as these
ones pretty much cover the use cases of "source-directory" variable.

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.