Re: [h-e-w] problems with source-directory

[Jason Rumney]

Jim Davidson <address@hidden> writes:

> Emacs includes a variable source-directory, whose semantics are 
> somewhat ambiguous.  It's defined as follows:
> 
>     Directory in which Emacs sources were found when Emacs was built.
>     You cannot count on them to still be there!
> 
> The problem is, certain utilities (e.g., autoload.el) expect this to
> be set to something reasonable, because they use the value.

The only places where I can find this used is `update-file-autoloads'
in emacs-lisp/autoload.el and `info-initialize' in info.el.
The former is only useful for regenerating loaddefs.el, and you would
only need to do that if you were hacking on the source. It is not
unreasonable to assume that the source should be installed in such a
case. The second is only a backup, so that info works when you have
built Emacs, but not yet installed it.

Since `update-file-autoloads' causes an error if source-directory is
not set, perhaps it's doc string could be updated to mention that it
is only useful when the source is installed.


-- 
Jason Rumney