> This is a beautiful thing...
>
> Signaling: (error "ECB requires a semantic-version >= 1.40beta7!")
> signal(error ("ECB requires a semantic-version >= 1.40beta7!"))
> [SNIP]
>
> I just grabbed the latest ECB to check it out - did a quick setup and
hadn't
> looked at prereq's yet.
>
> I think this type of startup checking would help JDE support as well...as
in
> reduce the maillist traffic a decent amount for this frequent basic setup
> problem.
Yes this is exactly the kind of checking I am shooting for in a one shot
installer.
I have had some time to spend on building a combined installer, and I have
the skeleton
of a one-shot installer for the 5 elisp packages. I also have several
questions:
________________
(#1) My toughest problem
I am shooting for an elisp only installer. This has the huge advantage of
having a single
combo package that works across different OSs and across different Emacs'
as well.
This means that I cannot use the 'Makefiles' included several of the
packages.
I have extracted the JDE elisp compile-if-needed functions and adapted them
for use with other
directories. This seems to work for some of the packages, but it fails on
the speedbar
package. I think it is failing because it is trying to compile an optional
lisp file
called w3-sb.el which requires w3-imenu (if memory serves).
I cant run this Makefile, so I am trying to look at the source to
understand what it is shooting
for. It looks like this approach is close to working, but I may need to
include
some of the logic in these makefiles in the elisp compiler.
Any ideas on this?
An alternative would be to include the .elc files in the distribution. I
know in theory
the .elc files from Xemacs and Gnu emacs are not byte compatible. In
practice are they?
Even if they are, is this a bad idea?
________________
(#2) Is there a robust way to check OS version within emacs under all
OSes, or
am I dreaming.
Paul responded to this earlier with:
> Please look at the JDE code. There are dozens of examples of OS checking.
> - Paul
I did look in the JDE code, and found many instances of testing the _type_
of OS
in use (e.g. 'system-type'). I could not find any checks of the OS
_version_.
My ultimate goal is to have a JDE that either works, or tells you why it
cannot work,
with your environment (e.g. Must have Win2000 Service pack 2). Of course I
will not
achieve this, but even 80% would be better than nothing.
_______________
(#3) What are the earliest versions of the five JDE related packages that
will work
with the current system?
Should I flag an error if anything except the most recent version is
present in the enviroment?
Or is there a set of minimum versions that someone can supply me with.
Can I assume that future versions of the same packages will retain backward
compatibility, or
should I flag those to the user?
Finally, it seems that earlier versions of some of those packages (which
are part of the Xemacs
current distribution) do not have any version variables present. I am
assuming that any package
w/o version variables are incompatible. correct assumption?
_________________
(#4) Ok I can implement this one from scratch, but I am wondering if it
is already
out there (or in emacs already). I want to execute the command "java
-version" as a
command line command and get back the output as a string. "start-process"
almost
works, but it doesn't handle the forward/backward slash issue (I think I
saw some JDE
code for that) and it doesn't tell me when the command has terminated.
Is there a command that wraps all this up for me?
Thanks for any pointers.
-dan
