Thien-Thi Nguyen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > () 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...
What is "~/" here? The sysadmin's $HOME? The user's? If my sysadmin installs something on my machine, I don't expect to have to read a README file or edit my configuration file to let it work. If a package manager installs something on my machine, same goes for it. > 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. The _point_ of the configure script is to check as soon as possible that the program will have a chance of working. > > - 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". So, your vision of a sysadmin's work is to just run "make && make install"?? To me, the role of the sysadmin installing something is also to check that the program works (i.e. is correctly installed). > 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. Why the hell would he have to? Give me just one case where a FreeBSD user would have to override the value given by the configure script of the package. > 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. But what's the problem here? AAUI, your point is that asking the sysadmin to type --with-diff=something is too much work for him. With dvc-site.el, if the sysadmin just does a plain ./configure (no args), then the user can still un-break his installation by putting a correct value in his ~/.emacs. Without dvc-site.el, ... it just THE SAME. Except that you remove the way for the sysadmin to get it right at the first time. > 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. I don't have FreeBSD installed, so I can't easily test what DVC gives with a FreeBSD non-GNU diff command. If DVC just works with it, I agree with you, and the FreeBSD package should just keep diff as the default. But since the maintainer actually had to patch the program, I suspect he had a good reason. -- Matthieu _______________________________________________ Dvc-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/dvc-dev
