Hi, I'd like to get a discussion going about possible improvements to GNU Emacs on Gentoo. If you got CCed make sure to reply to the list. Here are some ideas I've had.
* Firstly, please review this: http://dev.gentoo.org/~mkennedy/emacs/site-gentoo.el-rfc.txt I would like to see us move to something like the above for customization. In no particular order, here are some other changes I propose: * Move away from the big concatenation of /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/*-gentoo.el into /usr/share/site-lisp/site-start.el. Instead, leave site-start.el alone, and create a site-gentoo.el which loads each *-gentoo.el file (call these "site hooks") pragmatically. This has the benefit of freeing up site-start.el for user usage. The programmatic approach also allows for the possibility of the user defining their own site hooks. * Byte-Compile site-gentoo.el and all site hooks Perhaps this will make for more rapid load times. * Install elisp source in such a way that global recompilation is possible. It is a "dirty little secret" that our .elc files from add-on elisp packages are able to persist between emacs major and minor version upgrades. The format of byte-compilation can change between releases, and allowing these old .elc files to be loaded into an updated emacs can cause it to crash. I suggest we provide a way to recompile all .el files for elisp add-on packages (typically from the app-emacs/ category, but also from ebuilds supporting the emacs USE flag). This mechanism should be called whenever a new emacs upgrade is performed. We should probably keep a separate source archive directory somewhere so we can compile for multiple emacs implementations (eg. app-editors/emacs and app-editors/emacs-cvs). We should take whatever steps are necessary to ensure find-function/variable/library etc. still work properly. * emacs and emacs-cvs coexistence Following on from the previous point, it would be nice to clean up app-editors/emacs and app-editors/emacs-cvs so they co-exist more cleanly. (provide and /usr/bin/emacs and a /usr/bin/emacs-cvs -- I know there's already a version number symlink there). * Your Thoughts Here... Matt -- Matthew Kennedy Gentoo Linux Developer -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
