view lisp/README @ 2417:8b907450718f

[xemacs-hg @ 2004-12-05 08:48:12 by ben] The section on Troubleshooting (now 2.3) has been completely written and includes a lot of stuff that is not properly documented anywhere else. A fair amount of obsolete info has been deleted and I've incorporated the comments that people (mostly Stephen T) made. Former chapter 3 has been split up in two, one pertaining to basic I/O and the other to external I/O. What were formerly chapters 5 and 6 no longer exist as such; the info in them has been distributed across various other chapters. Old chapter 4 got split up, part going to the new chapter 4 on external I/O and part going to the new chapter 5 on the Internet. In this new chapter, stuff not pertaining to a specific package (e.g. VM or GNUS) was taken out of package-specific sections and a general mail section was constituted. Part of old chapter 5 remains in a new chapter 6 devoted to Emacs Lisp and other advanced stuff, and a section from old chapter 3 on basic init-file Lisp and some stuff from old chapter 5 on Info. The rest of chapter 5 was just misc and has gotten scattered to the winds (mostly in chapters 3 and 4). Old chapter 6 has also gotten quite scattered; there is no longer any section specifically devoted to Windows except one of the Installation sections (along with a section specfically devoted to Unix), and the rest has moved to join the appropriate non-Windows-specific section elsewhere. A lot of chapters had their sections rearranged and likewise for sections having entries rearranged, with the intention that the new arrangement should be more natural. In general I hope that stuff should be much easier to locate. I also rewrote the entries on the relation between XEmacs and GNU Emacs on the authors of XEmacs, including lots of info on who wrote specific subsections. However, this history is certainly not complete; I hope people will look over this and fix it up as necessary.
author ben
date Sun, 05 Dec 2004 08:48:12 +0000
parents 2cf5d151eeb9
children
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The files in this directory contain source code for the core XEmacs
facilities written in Emacs Lisp.  *.el files are Elisp source, and
*.elc files are byte-compiled versions of the corresponding *.el
files.  Byte-compiled files are architecture-independent.

Functions used only by files in this directory are considered
"internal" and are subject to change at any time.  All commands, and
most functions with docstrings, are part of the exported API.  In
particular, it is considered good style to use the Common Lisp
facilities provided in cl*.el.  (Yes, that's ambiguous.  Sorry, we
don't have a full specification of the API, as the Lispref is
chronically incomplete.  Anything described in the Lispref is part of
the API, of course.)

Libraries which implement applications and enhancements are placed in
the "packages", which are distributed separately from the core
sources.

#### Someone please update this.
#### Partially updated 2001-08-25 by sjt.  Needs more work.  Mike?

When XEmacs starts up, it adds certain directories in various
hierarchies containing Lisp libraries to `load-path' (the list of
directories to be searched when loading files).  These are: this
directory, its subdirectory ./mule (in Mule-enabled XEmacs only), the
site-lisp directory (deprecated), and all the lisp/PACKAGE
subdirectories of the xemacs-packages, mule-packages, and
site-packages hierarchies.  See setup-paths.el.

#### Is the following true or relevant any more?
bogus> Directories whose names begin with "-" or "." are not added to
bogus> the default load-path.

Some files which you might reasonably want to alter when installing or
customizing XEmacs at your site are:

	paths.el	You may need to change the default pathnames here,
			but probably not.  This is loaded before XEmacs is
			dumped.

	site-init.el	#### obsolete and removed?
			To pre-load additional libraries into XEmacs and dump
			them in the executable, load them from this file.
			Read the instructions in this file for a description
			of how to do this.

	site-load.el	#### description is obsolete
			This is like site-init.el, but if you want the 
			docstrings of your preloaded libraries to be kept in
			the DOC file instead of in the executable, you should
			load them from this file instead.  To do this, you must
			also cause them to be scanned when the DOC file is
			generated by editing ../src/Makefile.in.in and
			rerunning configure.
			#### new semantics
			This file will preload additional libraries listed in
			../site-packages and dump them into XEmacs.

	../site-packages  List of additional libraries read by site-load.el.

	site-start.el	This is loaded each time XEmacs starts up, before the
			user's .emacs file.  (Sysadmin must create.)  Can be
			inhibited for a given invocation with `--no-site-file'.

	default.el	This is loaded each time XEmacs starts up, after the
			user's .emacs file, unless .emacs sets the variable
			inhibit-default-init to t.  (Sysadmin must create.)
			Can be inhibited for a given invocation with `-q'.

	version.el	This contains the version information for XEmacs.

========================================================================
Original text follows:

The files in this directory contain source code for the XEmacs
facilities written in Emacs Lisp.  *.el files are Elisp source, and
*.elc files are byte-compiled versions of the corresponding *.el
files.  Byte-compiled files are architecture-independent.

#### Someone please update this.

bogus> When XEmacs starts up, it adds all subdirectories of the
bogus> site-lisp directory.  The site-lisp directory normally exists
bogus> only in installation trees.  For more information about the
bogus> site-lisp directory see the NEWS file.

bogus> After XEmacs adds all subdirectories of the site-lisp
bogus> directory, it adds all subdirectories of this directory to the
bogus> load-path (the list of directories to be searched when loading
bogus> files.)  To speed up this process, this directory has been
bogus> rearranged to have very few files at the top-level, so that
bogus> emacs doesn't have to stat() several hundred files to find the
bogus> dozen or so which are actually subdirectories.

bogus> Directories whose names begin with "-" or "." are not added to
bogus> the default load-path.

The only files which remain at top-level are those which you might
reasonably want to alter when installing or customizing XEmacs at your
site.  The files which may appear at top level are:

	paths.el	You may need to change the default pathnames here,
			but probably not.  This is loaded before XEmacs is
			dumped.

	site-init.el	To pre-load additional libraries into XEmacs and dump
			them in the executable, load them from this file.
			Read the instructions in this file for a description
			of how to do this.

	site-load.el	This is like site-init.el, but if you want the 
			docstrings of your preloaded libraries to be kept in
			the DOC file instead of in the executable, you should
			load them from this file instead.  To do this, you must
			also cause them to be scanned when the DOC file is
			generated by editing ../src/Makefile.in.in and
			rerunning configure.

	site-start.el	This is loaded each time XEmacs starts up, before the
			user's .emacs file.

	default.el	This is loaded each time XEmacs starts up, after the
			user's .emacs file, unless .emacs sets the variable
			inhibit-default-init to t.

	version.el	This contains the version information for XEmacs.