Re: Debian packages?

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

No need for any apologies - how else is anyone to learn anything without asking
questions!

I'd recommend starting with a tar.gz file from the emacspeak site for the most
recent released version of emacspeak. Choose some location in your home
directory. I have a directory called .elisp under my home directory and put all
emacs related packages in there.. In fact, I maintain two emacspeak trees. 
This is because I work from the svn repository of emacspeak and while Raman
goes to some length to ensure that the latest version in there is stable and
bug free, there are no guarantees. Having two trees means that if I download a
new version and its really broken, I have the previous version I can easily
switch back to (of course, I could just use svn versions and pull down an
earlier version, but if I have a broken emacspeak, this makes things very
difficult - sort of chicken and egg as I need emacspeak to operate). So, I have
~/.elisp/emacspeak1 and ~/.elisp/emacspeak2. I also have a symbolic link which
points to either emacspeak1 or emacspeak2, depending on which I'm
running/testing. 

I unpack the tar.gz file or download the svn version into either emacpseak1 or
emacspeak2, switch into the appropriate directory and do the make config make
emacspeak stuff. I don't do a make install as it isn't required. 

I then have an emacspeak startup file called 10speech.el which I place in my
/etc/emacs/site-start.d directory that adds /home/tcross/.elisp/emacspeak to
the load path and does the necessary setup stuff and loads the emacspeak
startup file (its equivalent to the file Raman provides for starting
emacspeak. Thats about it. There really isn't any secret voodoo or anything
involved. All that is really required is that emacs is able to find the
necessary lisp files (via the load-path variable) and you have the necessary
envrionment variables defined (i.e. DTK_PROGRAM, TCL_PROGRAM, DTK_PORT etc) and
you call the emacspeak startup file from somewhere - I like to do it early,
which is why I have the file in the /etc/emacs/site-start.d directory, but some
like to put it at the top of their .emacs file. 

I also have various other elisp ;ackages in my ~/.elisp directory, for example,
bmk-mngr, emms and some other packages that I want from the latest versions
rather than slightly older ones provided via the normal distro packages. 

Personally, I don't think there is any problem with installing stuff by hand -
it often requires a bit more work than a simple apt-get blah, but it does give
you full control. The only thing I do avoid is installing stuff I'm managing by
hand in the main directory trees. I leave these managed by my distro - so I
never put stuff under /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/share etc unless I really really
have to (I've had to do this with Oracle and I did it with ViaVoice). I do put
a fair bit of stuff in /usr/local/* and I make sure that /usr/local, like my
/home are on their own partitions. By doing this, I can always re-install Linux
(even switching to a different distro) without touching my home area or
anything I've installed by hand into /usr/local/*

. 
HTH

Tim



Zachary Kline writes:
 > Hello,
 >      You are right, I did have a misconception about how such things are done.
 > I can understand the trouble in keeping up with new Emacspeak releases--I suppose I was just under the impression that in general installing things outside of package management was something of a faux pas.
 > 	I suppose I just need to learn how to use svn to keep up with Emacspeak--patch TCL scripts myself, etc.  I'd also like to run it out of my home directory, if possible.
 > 	Might you have any advice on how to do this, Tim?  How do you go about it?
 > Sorry for any misunderstandings.
 > Thanks,
 > Zack.
 > 
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-- 
Tim Cross
tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx

There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
understand and those who do not understand what they manage.

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