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Re: Emacs cvs newbie problems


From: Steven T. Hatton
Subject: Re: Emacs cvs newbie problems
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2002 21:24:52 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020913

Luc Teirlinck wrote:

Steven T. Hatton wrote:

I was actually asking if there is a list of what packages 'should' be installed in order for Emacs to act 'normal'.

To look "normal" to me, none.  To look "normal" to you, I have no
idea.

I also was looking for something which will tell me how to install packages in the
  'correct' way.

To install package foo, put

(require 'foo)

in your .emacs.  Some packages may require additional steps.  This is
usually mentioned in the documentation for the package.
To me this is something of a borderline issue. If I do what a normal user would do and grab an rpm from SuSE Linux and let rpm do its magic, everything works fine. If I come into the cvs wanting to take a look at the latest build, this *appears* differently than it would to a typical user. I'll grant you, I am not an Emacs power user. XEmacs has really spoiled me in a lot of ways. The package system really *is* magic.

I guess that question relates to system administration rather than development in the sense that I'm trying to perform sysadmin proceedures. I actually wanted to know how to add a package system-wide. But that was not my question. My question is:

how do I find the information in a finite period? I'm not going to win any popularity contests by saying this on an Emacs developers' list, but I can't think of a more appropreate place to say it. The Emacs community does not communicate well with the uninitiated. I've said this on the XEmacs beta list as well. I understand there are many reasons things are this way. Easy to access documentation is a pain to create, and I know there is some really wonderful documentation for certain aspects of Emacs; perhas for most aspects of Emacs. But *finding* things seems unnecessarily difficult. This is a general statement which I believe *is* relevent to Emacs developers. I therefore am _not_ looking for answers to specific questions which I am using as examples. That being said, here is an example:

If I crack open the info reader and view the top level directory, I see an extensive list of topics. If I know what I'm looking for, and how to spell it, I can C-s for it. If I'm not so sure of what I'm looking for, finding something in that list can be rather difficult. The order in which the information is presented is not obvious, even to a person who is a long time (X)Emacs user. Having a way of sorting the list, for example, alpabetically, might be helpful.

Things have gotten much better with the introduction of easy to use documentation search tools. And I appreciate the effort of the person/people who created that functionallity.

I'm not really addressing a developer issue at the 'bug' level, or the 'new feature' level. This is a 'gestalt', 'weltanshauung' or 'paradigm' issue. I believe (X)Emacs has lost a lot of potentially productive user/developers because the initial learning curve makes it prohibatively expensive to learn. It's notnecessarrily that people are lazy. We simply have short-term productivity demands on us which prevent us from being able to invest the time necessary to master Emacs in the way the current structure requires.

I'm not saying I have the solutions to this 'perceived' problem. If I did, I would tell you what they are. I think what I'm saying, is: there seems to be a 'work-flow' issue with the way Emacs and the supporting materials are structured. I don't know exactly how to analyze this, but I'm suggesting the path a user needs to take to achieve 'typical' goals is often not clear. It would be an interesting study to take a dozen or so college freshmen, wire them up with monitors of biological stress indicators, and synchronize the data with a trace of their online behavior as they attempt to learn to use Emacs to edit XML with xmlns tags for a project which is due at the end of the week.

I believe you can get help for such questions at gnu.emacs.help.
This is a site for Emacs development.

  Here's an example of what's going on: When I open an elisp file and
  select Options->Syntax Highlighting, I get an error message in the
  echo area saying: "Wrong type argument: commandp, (quote
  global-font-lock-mode)"
This seems to be a different matter. I do not use the menu-bar
myself, so I have no experience with this.  I reproduced the described
behavior using emacs-21.3.50 -q.  Something similar happens for the
two options right below it.  The menu-bar is meant for beginning
users.  Hence I believe you should not have to worry about which
packages should be loaded.
My only reason for thinking it might be a package issue is because of similar types of behavior with XEmacs. I guess what I was looking for was a 'check list' . It now appears to me, such was not necessary. It would still be nice to have some type of a 'now that you've built Emacs, here's how to configure additional packages and features', pointer.

I believe that should be done
automatically for you.  I personally have the impression that this is
a bug.  (It seems to me that somehow these commands got quoted in a
situation where they should not have been.)

Well, I guess part of this is a result of the fact that I'm both a (GNU) Emacs newbie and a newbie to the Emacs cvs. I'm fairly proficient with XEmacs from the perspective of using it as an editor. In a pinch I can go and hack the LISP, I would like to be better at that. I have built XEmacs from cvs literally hundreds of times. It is part of my daily ritual, along with grabbing the latest Mozilla build. With XEmacs, most of the packages I'm interested in are available through the use of the package tool. I don't need to mess with configuring them. With Emacs, I have to do the same thing by hand. So, if I do have a *specific* question, it is, where to I find the 'how to install packages, gospel, accoring to the pros'? Perhaps you've answered this by telling me to look at the documentation for each package. There is something unsatisfactory with that answere. It begs the question of how a package provider should design his package for installation?


Sincerely,

Luc.

Here's something to think about:
Java - powerful, easy to use. - Created by Emacs hacker James Gosling, et al. Netscape Navigator - powerful, easy to use -Created by Emacs hackers Zawinski and Andreesen, et al. KDE - powerful, easy to use - Created by XEmacs user Matthias Ettrich, et al. Linux Kernel - powerful, (fairly) easy to configure, build and install - Created by Emacs user Linux Torvalds, et al.
Emacs - powerful - Created by Richard Stallman, et al.

-- STH






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