From: Yoni Rabkin <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Adding Emms to ELPA (take 2), and a technical question To: Richard Stallman <[email protected]> Cc: Robert Pluim <[email protected]>, [email protected] Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:43:39 -0400 (58 minutes, 27 seconds ago)
Richard Stallman <[email protected]> writes: > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > > Iʼd take a look at 'pdf-tools', it both compiles C-code and installs > > necessary packages using 'apt-get' and similar. > > That is an undesirable practice: it turns package installation into > something users won't keep track of. > > (Secondary practical issue: to succeed in running apt-get it would > have to run as root, I think.) I've had a look at pdf-tools and arrived at the conclusion that we won't be copying much from what pdf-tools does into Emms; the two project are too different, and pdf-tools does a few of other things I don't agree with. Any copying will probably be limited to the some stuff in the Makefile of pdf-tools that helps it prepare to be distributed with ELPA. That's the short of it. No need to read more if that is all you needed to know. Below the line is the longer version for anyone curious, or with too much time on their hands. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- pdf-tools does a lot more compilation than Emms. pdf-tools comes with over 13,000 lines of C/C++, while Emms has under 200 lines of C/C++. pdf-tools requires the compilation step in order to function at all. But Emms works fine without compiling anything, and only uses the compilation step to provide a binary which enhances functionality. Where Emms and pdf-tools are alike is that they both require build-tools to be present on the machine, and the compilation step is in essence the same. This is why I'll see if the pdf-tools Makefile has anything valuable for Emms and use that. Outside of compilation, I find it annoying that pdf-tools doesn't come with a proper manual. I needed to go and look up to figure out how to read the org file that came with pdf-tools. It isn't that much text, and the annoying folding that org does for what amounts to a simple README file is gratuitous at best. pdf-tools also uses its a package/distribution manager called cask, and also something called appveyor which I looked up on Wikipedia and found that "AppVeyor is a hosted, distributed continuous integration service", but that left me none the wiser as to why an AppVeyor file/s come with pdf-tools or what I am supposed to do with them. None of those make sense for such a small project, so I'm assuming that those are simply the tools the author/s of pdf-tools are used to working with, so that is what they used. -- "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"
