auctex: Advice for package providers
1.2.5 Providing AUCTeX as a package
-----------------------------------
As a package provider, you should make sure that your users will be
served best according to their intentions, and keep in mind that a
system might be used by more than one user, with different preferences.
There are people that prefer the built-in Emacs modes for editing TeX
files, in particular plain TeX users. There are various ways to tell
AUCTeX even after auto-activation that it should not get used, and they
are described in 
Introduction to AUCTeX Introduction.
So if you have users that don't want to use the preinstalled AUCTeX,
they can easily get rid of it. Activating AUCTeX by default is
therefore a good choice.
If the installation procedure did not achieve this already by placing
'auctex.el' and 'preview-latex.el' into a possibly existing
'site-start.d' directory, you can do this by placing
(load "auctex.el" nil t t)
(load "preview-latex.el" nil t t)
in the system-wide 'site-start.el'.
The '--without-texmf-dir' option can be convenient for systems that
are intended to support more than a single TeX distribution. Since more
often than not TeX packages for operating system distributions are
either much more outdated or much less complete than separately provided
systems like TeX Live, this method may be generally preferable when
providing packages.
The following package structure would be adequate for a typical fully
supported Unix-like installation:
'preview-tetex'
Style files and documentation for 'preview.sty', placed into a TeX
tree where it is accessible from the teTeX executables usually
delivered with a system. If there are other commonly used TeX
system packages, it might be appropriate to provide separate
packages for those.
'auctex-emacs-tetex'
This package will require the installation of 'preview-tetex' and
will record in 'TeX-macro-global' where to find the TeX tree. It
is also a good idea to run
emacs -batch -f TeX-auto-generate-global
when either AUCTeX or teTeX get installed or upgraded. If your
users might want to work with a different TeX distribution
(nowadays pretty common), instead consider the following:
'auctex-emacs'
This package will be compiled with '--without-texmf-dir' and will
consequently contain the 'preview' style files in its private
directory. It will probably not be possible to initialize
'TeX-macro-global' to a sensible value, so running
'TeX-auto-generate-global' does not appear useful. This package
would neither conflict with nor provide 'preview-tetex'.
Info Catalog
auctex: Loading the package
auctex: Installation
auctex: Advice for non-privileged users