Re: The load path

[Paul Jarc]

Rob Browning <address@hidden> wrote:
> If the local version isn't installed in the same place as the site
> installation, then it wouldn't try to load the site's files by
> default.  However, if you did want it to load them, you could just
> create a symlink to init.d, or make the init call yourself.

I'm thinking of the case where a user wants to avoid something the
admin put in the init code, or insert some other code ahead of it.
The user can't touch the sitewide init directory, so it can only be
controlled on the command line.

Disabling the init code is also a useful first step when tracking down
a problem - Emacs and Guile both have -q, and Emacs also has
--no-site-file.

> Using NUMBERname makes it very easy to predict what's going to
> happen.
...
> On the other hand, I can see the concern that the NUMBERname
> approach is perhaps best suited for a situation where you have
> centralized organization (i.e. a distribution).

Agreed on both counts.  My preference is to push work as far upstream
as possible (including when I'm upstream :) ), so I prefer systems
that let the individual packages easily cooperate so there's nothing a
distributor needs to do.

> As background, one of the original reasons for our proposed changes is
> to provide a standard place for distributions to put add-on package
> files (a la emacs/site-start.d/).

Packages' installation scripts could also find the site init directory
and insert their init files there.

> That might argue for a use-modules or require/provide style solution,
> though if appropriate, we'd want a modified one that only looks in the
> init.d dir so that startup files can't be confused with files in other
> packages (i.e. don't use load-path).

Maybe best practice would be to put the initialization code in a
normal module called (foo init), and then the init file merely loads
that module.


paul