The development guidelines don't explain what to do after making a local clone of the formula

[tzz]

It would be helpful if the "Building locally" development docs said what to do after build ... for those who don't know Homebrew wel but want to debug issues in emacs-plus:

• how to modify the formula once it's cloned
• where to find the source files
• how to modify the source files, test the build with the changes, and generate a patch with the changes

[d12frosted]

Hey @tzz ,

Small clarification. By 'source files' what do you mean? Emacs sources or the formula sources?

[tzz]

In #551 I needed the Emacs source files, but I think I may also need to modify the formula source files (patches and build commands).

[d12frosted]

I see. Not sure how that would help you, though.

I am totally in favor of improving the documentation, but I want to maintain only documentation relevant to the Emacs+ formula (as it's not the simplest formula out in the homebrew world). I definitely don't want to maintain a documentation explaining how to debug builds with brew (their documentation explains that well) and definitely don't want to explain how to develop Emacs (there is documentation for that). Same goes with using git. That being said, Emacs+ lacks better documentation of it's own parts. And maybe it can link mentioned docs to make things simpler for new to be contributors.

Also, I want to stress out two important things.

1. Emacs+ is just a formula of GNU Emacs for homebrew. It's not a distribution of Emacs (e.g. emacs-mac formula).
2. I rarely accept patches to Emacs sources. There are two cases when I do accept them. (1) When there is a critical patch that should be merged soon into upstream, but I want to stop the 'bleeding' ASAP. (2) When there is a macos-only feature that will be unlikely accepted into upstream, but Emacs+ users find it useful. In the first, the patch is usually somewhere in the mailing list. In the second case explaining how to use build script IMO should be enough. Everything else (e.g. developing Emacs) should be found in Emacs documentation.

[tzz]

ACK on both. Thank you for the explanations.

It's still unclear to me how to access the build directory when it fails, unfortunately. If that's a brew question then I'll head that way, but it seems this formula does some special setup.

If it's possible to add some links to the development docs here to brew or other docs answering my questions, that would probably help quite a few casual contributors.