bug#67292: emacs / emacs-transient collisions and bundling

[Maxime Devos]

Op 20-11-2023 om 11:22 schreef Simon Tournier:
> Hi,
>
> On Sun, 19 Nov 2023 at 23:44, Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> wrote:
>
> > Bug 1: emacs bundles emacs-transient.
> > (Likewise for quite a few other Emacs packages.)
>
> This is not a bug.  transient.el is part of Emacs since version 28, see
> NEWS:
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> * New Modes and Packages in Emacs 28.1
>
> ** transient.el
> This library implements support for powerful keyboard-driven menus.
> Such menus can be used as simple visual command dispatchers.  More
> complex menus take advantage of infix arguments, which are somewhat
> similar to prefix arguments, but are more flexible and discoverable.
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> When an user installs Emacs, they expect to have transient as builtin;
> it is not bundled.


This does not answer how the bundling is not a bug.

Unbundling is not incompatible with keeping builtins -- for example, 
emacs-minimal could be the ‘minimalistic Emacs, without the typical 
bundled ‘built-in’ stuff’, and emacs could be 'emacs-minimal + the 
unbundled stuff in propagated-inputs’.

(Well, preferably not propagated, but that's just a matter of wrapping 
or unions etc..)

Another option could be to unbundle things in the 'source' of emacs / 
emacs-minimal and copy over source code from the 'emacs-‘builtin’' 
packages during a build phase.

(IIUC, emacs-minimal is for compiling Emacs packages and for scripts, of 
which most probably have no need for keyboard-driven menus -- and if 
they do have need,)

>  I recommend to read the section:
>
>      * New Modes and Packages in Emacs X
>
> in NEWS release files to know which mode or package are included as
> builtin.

I won't -- my package manager is Guix, not Emacs.

> And yes, these packages are sometimes developed outside the
> Emacs tree using a dedicated repository, as transient.el or Org-mode for
> instance.
>
>
> > Bug 2: no collision handling.
>
> This is a bug, IMHO.  Indeed, if an user prefers another version of
> builtin modes or packages, they should not collide with the builtin
> ones.  Well, they do not collide when using “guix shell”:
>
>      guix shell -C emacs emacs-transient -E TERM -- emacs -q
>
> Therefore, maybe the issue comes from some specific code from “guix
> home”.  Hum, I do not know.

They do, in fact, collide -- as I mentioned in the e-mail you replied to:

> [...] because 
> "guix shell" (and likewise for "environment") suppresses collision error 
> messages:
>
> $ guix shell emacs emacs-transient
>
> (see: https://issues.guix.gnu.org/54350).

Best regards,
Maxime Devos

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