On Sun, Feb 10, 2002 at 02:08:56PM +1100, Donovan Baarda wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 07:41:31PM +0000, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > I have a suggestion, which may already have been thought of.
> >
> > Need: a python-module (pure Python) providing package should provide
> > byte-compiled versions for all installed python versions (as long as
> > there are no version dependency issues)
>
> Actually, it is slightly more complex than this. For starters, forgetting
> that not all python modules are compatible with all versions of python,
> there is a second need;
Not a problem.
> Need-2: installing a new version of Python should byte-compile all
> pre-installed Python modules for the newly installed Python version.
That's the whole cleverness of the emacsen solution -- see below.
> This makes it a bit tricky because it's hard to know where the "compile all
> for all" scripts should go; in the versioned Python packages, in the
> "Python" default wrapper, or in the modules themselves. The moment you think
> it's obvious, you dig deeper and find it introduces some dependancy nastys.
Quite -- but it's really good that the emacsen team have already
solved this problem, so the python team doesn't have to reinvent the
wheel.
> I'm not 100% sure of the details of the emacsen approach, but doesn't it use
> some sort of module-registration database? I can't help but think that it's
> a bit sad that you need to introduce _another_ database of installed stuff
> when you already have the dpkg database. However, perhaps that's the only
> way to get a truely "perfect" solution.
Yes, emacsen-common reads a database of install/remove command files.
See the /usr/lib/emacsen-common directory. It allows the packages to
be a little bit clever for a relatively small maintainer cost, as the
extra files are mostly boilerplate.
This allows installing/removing emacs packages to be performed
orthogonally to installing/removing different versions of emacs, and
means that any version-independent emacs packages can work with all
installed emacsen without having to be aware of which particular ones
are installed, and without having to have a separate version for each
emacs package.
Julian
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Debian GNU/Linux Developer
Queen Mary, Univ. of London see http://people.debian.org/~jdg/
http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~jdg/ or http://www.debian.org/
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