nXhtml

Auto load/setup suggestion

Asked by David Ross

First thanks for all of your contributions to emacs/emacsw32. Packaging overall and co-existence with the reality of window's market position is lacking and sorely needed.

I have had a high regard for your work since discovering, I think it was called, W32 installation utilities. nXhtml is even more impressive.

So what's my question, er suggestion? The large collection components you have integrated and created have a lot of value on their own. (but you knew that :-) ) IMO you (and Drew Adams) are setting a standard for completeness, attention to detail, simply fit and finish while demonstrating underexploited and unexploited potential of Emacs as a platform.

Adding granularity to the current auto-load/setup implementation would not only avoid the startup logjam, it would make all the tools available to a wider audience. I was impressed with the customization tools when I first saw them. It must be more then 10 years ago. Probably 15.

They are an impressive piece of work. I knew there was A LOT more that could be done with them then in the base libraries. Lisp is not my native tongue. The learning curve was too steep to experiment. It was exciting to see your usage of custom-load.

If this makes sense to you I would like to help. I know elisp syntax and semantics fairly well and have some knowledge of common lisp. I done a limited amount of lisp hacking and debugging.

I'm a software/systems architect/developer with broad and deep skill sets.

If I don't hear from you in a few days I'll hack my way through the changes trying not to soil your code too much.

david

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lborgman
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Best lborgman (lennart-borgman) said : 		#1

Hi David,

Thank you for your nice words. You are very welcome, of course!

Since the nXhtml code is in bazaar here at Launchpad you can just clone it and start. You probably know more than me about merging so please tell me how we can do it.

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lborgman (lennart-borgman) said : 		#2

See message to David.

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David Ross (geek4allseasons) said : 		#3

Hi Lenard,

My apologies for not following up. I am very interested in contributing something back to the community for the incredibly good software I've used and learned from.

I'm working alone. The good news is that I get to do everything. :-) The bad news is I have to do everything. :-(

Windows is not my native development platform having resisted/avoided it for philosophic/aesthetic reasons. A while ago it was time to bite-the-bullet, dig in to make some sense of what's under the hood.

As part of larger technology integration/development effort I've focused on integrating Linux/GNU Win32 tools, extensive Win32 UI customization (open source/freeware) and assembling a large collection of diagnostic/debugging tools. Most recently, I've had to use most if not all the preceding to stay out of windows admin black holes.

The drama level has tapered off. Stability may have been achieved. I'm not yet certain that the light at the end of the tunnel isn't a locomotive. :-| :-)

Along the way, when not banging my head against the wall, I've given considerable thought to Emacs integration/customization. I would appreciate sharing them with you off-line.

Not being a card carrying member of the Emacs development community any idea/thought I dream up would be exactly that. A dream, speculation.

If my musing are valid (IMO) it might be a basis for breaking what seemed to me a tautological dialect on customization found in an Emacs Developers list thread a couple of three years ago. I should be able to create a summary before the weekend (Windows Black-Hole Gods willing.)

Please let me know what email address to use.

OBTW. I had a problem compiling nxhtml.el (included in the patched installer package) The first problem was what seem to me to be a malformed function (one of the something-chunk-somethings). The compiler didn't like the the comments when it was expecting a doc-string. After I fixed that other errors further down the file were reported.

At that point I gave up and looked for bug reports at ourcomments and launchpad. I thought about checking out the head from the repository, but thought it wiser to check with you first.

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lborgman (lennart-borgman) said : 		#4

Hi David,

Yes, please mail me privately so we can see what we can do.

I guess you already are using the patched version EmacsW32 on MS Windows? I made that to make it more easy getting started with Emacs on MS Windows. The installer for Emacs+EmacsW32 includes for example grep.

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David Ross (geek4allseasons) said : 		#5

Thanks lborgman, that solved my question.