Multiple issues with InnoSetup XEmacs

[Per Mildner SICS Usenet]

The new InnoSetup installer for XEmacs-21.4.18 has a number of problems.

1. Installs in C:\XEmacs
This is just plain wrong. The Windows way is to install into something like 
(the properly localized version of) C:\Program Files\XEmacs

2. The way to update packages is just too clunky for Windows. In addition, 
it does not work.
When I do update-and-install and select xemacs-base for update I get 
"Autoload error" the next time I start XEmacs. M-x list-load-path-shadows 
shows a lot of shadowing betwen things like "...\Packages\lisp\xemacs-base\" 
and "...\Packages\xemacs-packages\lisp\xemacs-base\".

3. The old installer based on Cygwin netinstall was much nicer when it came 
to package handling, when it updated the packages it "just worked" and it 
also automatically selected all outdated packages for update. Unfortunately 
the XEmacs binaries for the netinstall has not been updated for a long time 
and last I tried, it failed to download a few packages (gnus 1.87 and 
xemacs-base 2.00).

In summary, the InnoSetup installer is worse than the netinstall installer 
it replaced. Apart from being worse, the installed XEmacs is broken when it 
comes to package updating.

(To end on a brighter note: XEmacs installation on Windows still has a long 
way to go until it sucks as much as that for FSF emacs, last I looked the 
GNU Emacs win32 binaries were distributed as tar files, which is hilarious.)

Regards,