vm team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Underwood <612222@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

OK, Uday asked me to comment on this since I package VM for Fedora.

Here's how things work for Fedora packaging (and by extension RHEL and
CentOS):

Files such as NEWS, COPYING, README and other documentation are denoted
as %doc in the package spec file. What this does is say to the packaging
software (i.e. rpmbuild) "These files are documentation for the
package". rpmbuild then installs them in
/usr/share/doc/%{packagename}-%{version}.

In other words, we don't actually make use of the way that a package
installs documents natively. We really don't want to install them under
some directory such as /usr/share/emacs/etc. If the upstream vm release
does that we'd end up moving them anyway (this is no big deal though).

The above discussion though seems to have broadened in scope by
considering where images etc should be installed. My feeling on this is
that it's a problem with upstream emacs. Currently, for almost all add-
on packages, everything (lisp, image files etc) is dumped into
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/package. It would be great if there was a
better directory structure for add-on packages such as:

/usr./share/emacs/site-packages
/usr./share/emacs/site-packages/lisp
/usr./share/emacs/site-packages/images
/usr./share/emacs/site-packages/etc

What would be great is if upstream promoted a directory structure for
add-ons, and then all packages adopted use of that. This should also be
integrated with Tom Tromey's package.el (see recent discussions on
emacs-devel).

However, it would be a really bad move for VM to autonomously adopt some
directory structure of its own.

S, in summary, I feel:

1/ Don't worry about installing NEWS etc - it's up to distributions to
do that according to their packaging policies.

2/ Discuss with upstream emacs developers a better strategy for
subdirectories for add-on packages.

-- 
Wishlist: Install NEWS in builds
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/612222
You received this bug notification because you are a member of VM
development team, which is a direct subscriber.

Status in VM (View Mail) for Emacs: Triaged

Bug description:
The VM NEWS file gets lost when distros install VM.  Change the build process so that it gets installed in emacs/etc.  

Ulrich thinks all VM-related files should go into a subdirectory $(prefix)/share/emacs/etc/vm.  Other files that could go into this subdirectory are 

CHANGES
README
TODO

Perhaps the images files should go here too?