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From: | Lennart Borgman |
Subject: | Re: w32 does not have emacsclient/server - getting paper size |
Date: | Sat, 16 Jul 2005 01:07:47 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317) |
David Kastrup wrote:
I believe that this was my first thought long ago too, but I am actually not sure it is not an intelligent solution. You have to have more of the picture to decide that I believe.Ghostscript is not installed that way on w32. It is not supposed to be find in the PATH. That is because the w32 "architecture" is different. You can only find Ghostscript through the registry (or searching the whole disk ;-)Does not sound too intelligent.
Yes, I agree. On w32 I think at least new users would expect this to work. If we want them to switch to GNU/Linux then I believe we should anticipate that they will expect this on GNU/Linux too. If you think this is the right way to go then I would be glad if you (or someone else) did this for Posix systems. Then I (or someone else) will implement this on w32 because at least I feel it is the right way to go.That would be very nice. The problem is however that until this is done Emacs is kind of a second class citizen that do not have access to things all other w32 programs has. And that makes for a bad impression.So unless the registry access is required for implementing some cross-platform functionality, there is no motivation to add it into Emacs because that would only encourage unportable applications. The right way to go about this is first to create an API that is useful across operating systems. Then this API can be filled with life. It would appear that on Posix system, this would entail a read-only interface into setlocale(3), and maybe on w32 reading registry keys. Whether those interfaces should be exposed to Lisp, is a different question. It would make sense to define this stuff with the Posix semantics, and then let w32-specific code translate this into the respective registry reading calls.
Fine, then we could perhaps have a common goal in this small but not unimportant detail. It is not unimportant since it is part of a bigger picture concerning the integration with the OS that new users probably do expect.What capability? Reading the registry? Don't be silly. Querying the paper size? Well, I don't see why that omission should be less of a problem on a Unix-like operating system.
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