Re: [Emacspeak] Packaging Emacspeak Best Practices?

Hey Robert.

I like the spirit of what you are trying to do though.

As I was using Emacspeak earlier today, I was thinking of how cool it would be to create some sort of a wizard to get novices onboard with Emacs and Emacspeak. Such a wizard could perhaps even create an init file for the user if such does not exist.

I am hoping to find some time over the weekend and write up a quick guide just for Mac users and perhaps Raman could include it as part of the Emacspeak documentation.

I think once you know the system, things seem pretty easy. I can imagine though how overwhelming this all may seem to someone who has never dealt with non-GUI CLI stuff.

Anyway, curious what approach you decide to go with.

On Sat, Feb 3, 2024 at 2:28 PM Robert Melton <emacspeak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Tim--

Thanks so much. Amazing feedback, learned a lot and I feel like it helped
me dodge a lot of bad ideas.

The meta-package idea is really good, and I think I am going to follow that
route. Since swiftmac has zero dependencies, and mac only has two, an
emacspeak-support package would only need to do a handful of simple
things:

1. Ensure they have git
2. Ensure swift compiler is setup for swiftmac
3. Ensure python3 and sox are setup for mac
4. Ensure a version of emacs is available that supports mac-ignore-accessibility
5. Git clone to a place in the brew tree
6. make config, make, make swiftmac
7. Output instructions

The only really fiddly bit is that if they want to avoid double-voice they will need
to use the emacs installed, but I will put in instructions how to make it the system
default if they want, else the path to it.

The other thing you brought up, the launch from dock, launch from shell issue van
be fixed with brew and a package like emacs-plus which has an Emacs.app version
included with it that just needs to be added to the Applications, but again this will
have to be something the user opts into.

> On Feb 3, 2024, at 17:08, Tim Cross <theophilusx@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> If you decide to go ahead with a package, my advice would be to keep it
> as simple as possible. Don't try to satisfy everyone and don't try to
> make the package too clever. In fact, it might be worth thinking of it
> as more like a meta package. What it does is just ensure that all
> necessary dependencies are installed, checks out Emacspeak from git into
> some directory, builds it and then tells the user what to add to their
> init file. For example, ensures they have a hombrew version of emacs and
> sox installed, checkout git into an emacspeak directory, run config,
> make and provide some instructions for updating their init file
> (possibly including adding environment variables for DTK_PROGRAM and
> adding a load-path entgry).

--
Robert "robertmeta" Melton
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