Re: Autoload from a web page?

[Lennart Borgman]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
>    But the risk is about doing this in an uncontrolled way. A lot of sw
>    is updated in a similar way today (in a way that tries to control the
>    risks).
>
> Just because it is common does not make it acceptable.
>
> We do not want software to be autoloaded from anywhere outside
> the user's machine.  The user should always have control over
> installing it in the machine.
>
> (See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
> for a similar issue.)


That is a totally different context than the one I am  targetting.


My scenario is this:

- You have group of related elisp files in a common place on the web.
- You download one of them, but it turns out that it does `require' or
autoload that supposes you have downloaded the other files too.

In a situation like that it is possible to set up for autoloading
things by downloading them from the web without compromising security
(or at least not more than when you download a file yourself) since
you know which files will be downloaded.


Note: Of course this first assumes that you download one or two files
with the necessary information.