RE: [VETO] Support package-prefix and fix mail-locking in configure

 Ar an naoiú lá de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Ben Wing: 

 > [...]  I think --package-roots or something of that sort would be better
 > than --package-prefix; before I realized what --prefix did I had a very
 > hard time figuring out how to specify where to install XEmacs, since
 > --prefix is a pretty damn opaque name.  I was looking for
 > --install-location or something obvious.

Most Unix users use their OS packages--RPMs, BSD ports, etc--so they never
worry about --prefix or --package-root, because they never get exposed to
it. The distribution packagers tend to ship with a hefty selection of XEmacs
packages, and it’s relatively rare that users want to install more.

And if you’re sysadmin for a large site where many people are using XEmacs,
you should install the Sumo packages anyway, because you can’t predict which
subset of them your users will want. So any changes made here will provoke
questions from a relatively small proportion of the userbase; people who are
either sysadmins or distribution package maintainers, but who have trouble
reading the basic documentation.

What people might worry about could be installing per-user lisp code and
packages, and frankly at the moment I’m unclear as to how exactly I would do
that. Un-archive a Sumo tarball and a mule-packages tarball under ~/.xemacs/
? Possibly. Since I’ve root on my local machine, I un-archive them under
/usr/local/lib/xemacs, but that’s not something I can tell $random_user on
comp.emacs.xemacs to do, so I’ve avoided suggesting installing packages
there. 

 > Although maybe no one has asked for this kind of stuff, I think that's
 > because most people just give up before trying to install packages
 > themselves since it's too complicated and not well documented.  

I would disagree; installing Sumo tarball is uncomplicated and documented,
for anyone with admin access to the system. 

 > I have a feeling this turns off a fair number of people, who may just go
 > use GNU Emacs because everything comes with it automatically.

Reading http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsAndXEmacs , a recurring
issue with people who switched to GNU Emacs is the font-lock
implementation. Packages aren’t mentioned, except in XEmacs’ favour. Lisp
code not running on XEmacs is a problem.  

-- 
“Ah come on now Ted, a Volkswagen with a mind of its own, driving all over
the place and going mad, if that’s not scary I don’t know what is.”