Re: ~/.xemacs/ or ~/xemacs/? (Was: Re: [XEmacs] New Maintainer, soonish.)
karlheg@cathcart.sysc.pdx.edu (Karl M. Hegbloom) writes:
> I'm doing this so it will be possible to install both GNU Emacs and
> XEmacs on the same machine, without user config file clash hassles.
> This way, nobody has to write conditionals into ~/.emacs to make it
> work with both XEmacs and GNU Emacs.
But many people *want* to write conditionals. They want to have the
bulk of the code be shared and just have some conditionals for the
flavor specific bits. I'd say this is the user's problem. IMO they
should just put a
(cond ((eq *emacs-flavor 'xemacs) (load "~/.xemacs/emacs.el"))
((eq *emacs-flavor 'emacs) (load "~/.emacs/emacs.el"))
in their .emacs file if they need that, and I imagine few will...
In general, I urge you to be very careful here. You're moving from
the role of packager to upstream author. It's a narrow line, and one
I've had to back away from several times in working on emacsen-common
(and the backspace modifications, etc.) Note that unless you're going
to get this behavior accepted as the upstream standard, monkeying with
the per-user startup behaviors is a very risky business, and is likely
to generate a lot of unfriendly mail that you'll have to deal with.
As an example, what happens for users in heterogeneous environments
with an NFS mounted home directory (like every student in our my
department here). On any system where they're not running Debian (and
your xemacs package), their startup files no longer work...
Hope I didn't misunderstand the problem, or your intent.
--
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930
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