Re: Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition

[Jambunathan K]

Thorsten <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello, though not an Emacs developer I have an suggestion to make: why
> not outfactor all elisp-libraries that are platform independent to a
> Dropbox folder (eventually using elpa for this folder), and than share
> this folder (read only) with anybody interested?  The core part of emacs
> could be compiled for all the major platforms, and the emacs developers
> make sure that the core and the libraries are always in consistent state
> and work out of the box.
>
> Then having the identical work emacs environment i.e. on Win 7 and
> Ubuntu would only involve to install the Emacs 2.4 Dropbox Edition, that
> is the absolute minimal platform dependent core, and to put a symlink as
> .emacs.d to the dropbox folder in your home folder on your diffenrent
> machines.
>
> This shared Dropbox folder would have a smart file structure with one
> init.el that has all the requiere's (to be commented out), a subfolder
> site-lisp with all the 'vendors' libraries, and a subfolder
> my-customisations with one user customisation file per library, i.e. it
> looks like after emacs bancrupsy is declared, not like before (with one
> giant .emacs.el).
>
> So _all_ the configuration and _all_ .el or .elc files are in the
> Dropbox folder and therefore valid without change on all my machines,
> and the smart emacs developers make sure that only relative links to the
> filesystem are used, that work on Windows and Linux.  No more hours and
> days in trying to emulate i.e. my emacs latex environment on my linux PC
> on my win 7 notebook, only to start over from scratch when updating
> hardware or software.
>
> That would take a huge burden from emacs users, and I guess the Dropbox
> guys would like to have many emacs users as clients. Since its all tiny
> textfiles, the free 10GB on Dropbox will most likely suffice.
>
> I hope this suggestion is not embarrassing in its ignorance. Its born
> out of much pain in trying to not only share my work and configuration
> files via Dropbox, but to have "the same emacs" on my Win7 machine as on
> my Ubuntu machine.

Adding my 2 cents here.

I wonder whether the recent support for creating themes - which is a
`drop box' for bunch of related custom variables - would come in handy,
to atleast address a part of the configuration requirements.

I believe there could be instances where a `drop box' might need some
sort of init code that goes beyond just setting some custom
variables. May be custom themes can be extended to include associating
some sort of init code as well ...

I recently split my .emacs - I felt that gnus and org configuration were
slightly growing day by day. It is during this process that I happened
to discover initsplit.el. In some sense, initsplit.el is a `drop box'
organized around groups - as in `gnus group' or `org group'.

Jambunathan K.

>
> Cheers Thorsten
>     
>