2. Installation

2.1 Distribution

Patcher is available either as a standalone package, or as part of the standard `xemacs-devel' XEmacs package.

You can get `xemacs-devel' in three different ways:

• You can install `xemacs-devel' from within XEmacs via the package user interface (accessible from the `Tools' menu or via M-x list-packages).

• You can also download the `xemacs-devel-<version>-pkg.tar.gz' tarball from ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/packages/, and unpack it where you put the other packages.

• `xemacs-devel' sources are available from the XEmacs CVS repository. The module name is `xemacs-devel'. See http://www.xemacs.org/Develop/cvsaccess.html for more information about the XEmacs CVS repository.

I also provide Patcher as a standalone package. This is mainly for my personal usage (when developing and debugging new versions) but you might want to use it if you're not interested in the rest of `xemacs-devel'. The standalone version of Patcher can be found at http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/software/xemacs.php. You will also find different inlined versions of this documentation at that place. For installation instructions, please read the `INSTALL' file.

2.2 Requirements

Patcher currently works only with XEmacs 21.4 or later. I'm not sure it works with earlier versions of XEmacs, but I'm sure it does not work with GNU Emacs (see below).

Patcher might also have some other requirements, depending on how you use it:

• If you let Patcher create ChangeLogs for you (see section 4.4 ChangeLogs Handling), you will need the `add-log' library from the `xemacs-base' package, version 1.48 or later, installed on your system. That's actually the may reason for Patcher not being able to run in GNU Emacs, though I have not tried to port it yet.

• If you want to send mails from Patcher (see section 4.2.1 Mail Methods), you will need a mail user agent. Patcher currently supports `sendmail', `message' and `Gnus' natively and through the `compose-mail' interface. Other MUA might be partly supported when used with compose-mail. Patcher will probably suffer from non critical deficiencies in that case however (it will issue warnings).

2.3 Insinuation

With a proper installation of Patcher (either way), you don't need any special trickery in your `.emacs' file because all entry points to the library should be autoloaded.

However, Patcher has the ability to hook into external libraries, but won't do so unless requested. Currently, Patcher has hooks for Gnus only. If you're using Gnus as your MUA, you might want to add the following line to your `gnusrc' file:

(patcher-insinuate-gnus)

This will add some facilities described along the text.

This document was generated by XEmacs shared group account on December, 19 2009 using texi2html 1.65.