AucTeX

["Davide G. M. Salvetti" <salve@debian.org>]

AucTeX is listed as orphaned in wnpp; I'm willing to take over its
maintenance if nobody objects.

I'll be able to ship release 9.8i --- the latest one, I think --- in a few
days; I guess I'm able to fix all outstanding bugs I am aware of.

I've a bunch of questions about this package which may well be just
newbie's questions, so I'm carbon copying to debian-mentors as well:
please, let's talk there about this if it isn't appropriate to
debian-devel.

Questions:
----------

1) AucTeX has many .el's which should be shipped byte-compiled: should I
compile them with some specific Emacs flavor or doesn't it matter which
Emacs I'll use?  (Please consider that, AFAIK, XEmacs comes with its own
AucTeX, so AucTeX should probably care only about GNU/Emacs; I'm not sure,
about that, though, mainly 'cause I don't use XEmacs :-).)

2) Should I remove byte-compiled source files in the binary package in
order to minimize its size?  (It's a matter of some 600k; current AucTeX
package behaves this way.)

3) Current AucTeX package puts its data (.elc's) in /usr/lib/emacs/common;
should I put them in /usr/share/emacs/whatever_is_more_appropriate or
something else instead?  (Please, consider FHS and FSSTND, and the fact
many packages already put stuff in /usr/share.)

4) AucTeX needs to periodically scan (La)TeX style files to keep itself in
touch with what one has installed on his machine;  it does this by
cron.weekly.  Current AucTeX package puts resulting files under /usr
(precisely just where it puts its data: /usr/lib/emacs/common);  I believe
I should put things under /var, instead: any comments, please?

5) Current AucTeX package puts its configuration files directly under
/etc/elisp: is this still good behavior?

6) Current AucTeX package asks specific questions to the user in preinst
(stead of postinst) under certain conditions (namely if the user has
already installed some custom AucTeX version, or if he's upgrading from
really old package versions): I think its really the right place to ask
that and it does not go against policy (not all user are asked these
questions, just the ones who have conflicting software installed), but I'd
like to have some feedback from someone more experienced than me.
(Obviously all of the other general questions that are necessary to ask are
asked in postinst.)

Waiting for comments,

Davide G. M. Salvetti - IW5DZC [JN53fr]
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