Variable names of package hierarchies

[Ralf Angeli]

* Steve Youngs (2006-01-30) writes:

> * Ville Skyttä <scop at xemacs.org> writes:
>
>   > On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 08:21 +1000, Steve Youngs wrote:
>   >> 
>   >> That stuff is internal, there shouldn't be any reason for AUCTeX to
>   >> look at it.  If you are trying to determine installation directories,
>   >> it's simple...
>   >> 
>   >> System-wide:
>   >> 
>   >> $prefix/lib/xemacs/site-packages/
>
>   > It's not that simple, depending of course on exactly what one
>   > wants to support.  For example, many distributions patch the above
>   > to $prefix/share/xemacs/[...].
>
> This might be a little kludgey, but there's always `config-value'...
>
> ,----[ C-h f config-value RET ]
> | `config-value' is a compiled Lisp function
> |   -- loaded from "config"
> | (config-value CONFIG-SYMBOL)
> | 
> | Documentation:
> | Return the value of the configuration parameter CONFIG_SYMBOL.
> `----
>
> See `config-value-file' for the symbols you can look up.

But isn't using {early,late,last}-packages more robust than using
`config-value'?  By using {early,late,last}-packages we can rely on
XEmacs to sort out (non-)existent directories and don't have to fiddle
with those manually.  And we don't have to make any assumptions like
$prefix/lib/xemacs/site-packages if PACKAGE_PATH was not configured
which may break as soon as you decide to use a different default
location for packages.

-- 
Ralf