() Matthieu Moy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> () Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:48:14 +0200
The guy installing DVC should have a way to have an installation that _works_. Sure. Do "make all install", frob ~/.emacs as directed in the README (and docs, and "make install" blurb, ideally), enjoy. Actually... I didn't test, but I suspect the FreeBSD patched because we require GNU diff and GNU path, so the installer _must_ have a way to say "hey, I need to use GNU patch, not plain patch". ...since there is no "make check" support, there is really no need for these programs for either "make" or "make install", anyway. Then, the user can override it in his .emacs, and if it does so, the default provided by the installer is ignored. If that has to happen anyway, i don't see why it's necesarry to burden the config/install process w/ checks for those programs. > - change from: (defvar dvc-site-diff-executable "@DIFF@") > to: (defvar dvc-site-diff-executable "diff") Your default value assumes that "diff" will work. You could equally say that the default value doesn't assume anything, because DVC never uses those values for "make" or "make install". Giving the user a default which doesn't work is bad. But giving the guy who does the installation the responsibility (by proxy via the configure script) of guessing (perhaps wrongly for any particular user) a default is not only bad, it's pointless; the user will have to override it anyway. If there's no value OK for everybody, I don't see how you can do without asking the installer to provide it (ideally, the configure script should check that diff will work and fall back to gdiff otherwise). I agree that customizability is desirable, but disagree that such concerns are for the guy doing the installation to worry about. The more you can move that out of configure-time and into runtime, under user (who might not be the guy doing the installation, keep in mind) control, the better. Now, in the case of diff(1), see how Emacs itself handles the situation: | (defcustom diff-command "diff" | "*The command to use to run diff." | :type 'string | :group 'diff) Straightforward, simple, easy to understand for the user, and slackful for the guy installing Emacs. Unless DVC has some extremely specific requirements of its diff, perhaps even better than what i proposed earlier (which just strips one layer of indirection), would be to remove all these layers of indirection and use `diff-command' directly. thi _______________________________________________ Dvc-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/dvc-dev
