auctex: Advice for non-privileged users
1.2.6 Installation for non-privileged users
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Often people without system administration privileges want to install
software for their private use. In that case you need to pass more
options to the 'configure' script.
The main expedient is using the '--prefix' option to the 'configure'
script, and let it point to the personal home directory. In that way,
resulting binaries will be installed under the 'bin' subdirectory of
your home directory, manual pages under 'man' and so on. It is
reasonably easy to maintain a bunch of personal software, since the
prefix argument is supported by most 'configure' scripts.
You'll have to add something like
'/home/myself/share/emacs/site-lisp' to your 'load-path' variable, if it
isn't there already.
Now here is another thing to ponder: perhaps you want to make it easy
for other users to share parts of your personal Emacs configuration. In
general, you can do this by writing '~myself/' anywhere where you
specify paths to something installed in your personal subdirectories,
not merely '~/', since the latter, when used by other users, will point
to non-existent files.
For yourself, it will do to manipulate environment variables in your
'.profile' resp. '.login' files. But if people will be copying just
Elisp files, their copies will not work. While it would in general be
preferable if the added components where available from a shell level,
too (like when you call the standalone info reader, or try using
'preview.sty' for functionality besides of Emacs previews), it will be a
big help already if things work from inside of Emacs.
Here is how to do the various parts:
Making the Elisp available
..........................
In GNU Emacs, it should be sufficient if people just do
(load "~myself/share/emacs/site-lisp/auctex.el" nil t t)
(load "~myself/share/emacs/site-lisp/preview-latex.el" nil t t)
where the path points to your personal installation. The rest of the
package should be found relative from there without further ado.
Making the Info files available
...............................
For making the info files accessible from within Elisp, something like
the following might be convenient to add into your or other people's
startup files:
(eval-after-load 'info
'(add-to-list 'Info-directory-list "~myself/info"))
Making the LaTeX style available
................................
If you want others to be able to share your installation, you should
configure it using '--without-texmf-dir', in which case things should
work as well for them as for you.
Info Catalog
auctex: Advice for package providers
auctex: Installation
auctex: Installation under MS Windows