Installing vterm via an external package manager

akermu / emacs-libvterm

Emacs libvterm integration

GNU General Public License v3.0

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Installing vterm via an external package manager #186

Open akater opened 4 years ago

akater commented 4 years ago

I am packaging vterm for use in an external package manager. The installation is supposed to go as follows:

compile elisp file(s)
compile vterm-module
install

Currently, when installing from MELPA, elpa/vterm directory is not cleaned after vterm-module is compiled. I'd like to know which files are supposed to be present in the package directory for vterm to function properly so that I don't install unnecessary ones after the compilation is over.

jixiuf commented 4 years ago

I think only vterm.el and vterm-module.so is needed

akater commented 4 years ago

It does work with only those two in site-lisp when installed from current master branch, thank you.

akater commented 4 years ago

The main reason why I want to install vterm from an external package manager, is its non-elisp dependency. In particular, I find it terribly inconvenient to manually patch vterm-module-compile to use system-libvterm or make other modifications to this build process. So I have extended the issue topic. I have

a proposition: to isolate vterm-module-compile in its own .el file; I'll be working on pull request soon
another question: I'm not terribly experienced with C infrastructure; does it make sense to put elisp.h, utf8.h, vterm-module.h somewhere in /usr/include after vterm is compiled, as part of its installation process?

akater commented 4 years ago

I believe more extensive build instructions are needed in README, due to C dependency, hopefully this will be the start of it. This is a part of a more general issue: since Emacs has modules now, and they prove to be very useful (thanks a lot for vterm!), current approach to elisp packaging is becoming increasingly inadequate. I believe Emacs will eventually need a more mature build DSL with much improved define-package but it's likely better to start small and discover best practices on a per-package level.