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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.