Re: Building 22.1, on Ubuntu

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-09-09 10:47, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com> wrote:
>On 08/09/2007, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
>> As for improving Emacs, it may not be easy to list the package names
>> of dozens, hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions, or even other OS
>> systems.  I commonly build Emacs on Solaris and BSD systems too, for
>> example, and `xaw3dg-dev' doesn't really mean anything useful there.
>> But that's a very interesting idea to explore a bit :)
>
> I'll collect my findings on my site when I've finished.

Nice.  IMHO, that's exactly the free software spirit that we should
foster in communities like the Emacs' users community.

Please note that the Emacs source tree contains already a lot of useful
documentation of this sort.  The file `etc/MACHINES' lists various
configure script options, environment setup and other useful bits that
building Emacs may require.

I don't see Ubuntu GNU/Linux mentioned in the current CVS tree of Emacs,
so if you are willing to collect some of the experience you have gained
so far in a short, concise summary -- something like a paragraph or two
-- it may be a very useful addition to the mini guides of that file :-)

>> Now you have gtk-dev too, so Emacs will use the GTK+ `widgets' for
>> displaying its menu, context menus when you right-click with a mouse,
>> and neat GTK+ based buttons.
>
> But only if you run ./configure --with-x-toolkit=gtk which is helpful.

If you are building a fairly recent snapshot of Emacs from CVS, then
this should already be the default.  Having said that, it is probably ok
to be a little more verbose in the help text, if you feel like it.

> Perhaps the INSTALL file could make it clear just what this implies,
> for those that don't associate gtk with widgets.

The relevant bits of text are already there.  My INSTALL copy contains
among other things:

% To get more attractive menus, you can specify an X toolkit when you
% configure Emacs; use the option `--with-x-toolkit=TOOLKIT', where
% TOOLKIT is `athena', `motif' or `gtk' (`yes' and `lucid' are synonyms
% for `athena').  On some systems, it does not work to use a toolkit
% with shared libraries.  A free implementation of Motif, called
% LessTif, is available from <http://www.lesstif.org>.  Compiling with
% LessTif or Motif causes a standard File Selection Dialog to pop up
% when you invoke file commands with the mouse.  You can get fancy
% 3D-style scroll bars, even without LessTif/Motif, if you have the
% Xaw3d library installed (see "Image support libraries" above for Xaw3d
% availability).

>> Now is the time to run `make distclean', or extract a clean tarball
>> of the Emacs sources and build everything with this latest version of
>> a build-environment you have installed.
>
> Sorry, you've lost me here Giorgos.
> Each failed attempt was followed by make distclean to clean up the
> rubbish. I'm OK with that.
> How to extract a clean tarball though?

I meant a clean copy of the Emacs source tree, but you already ran make
distclean, so you should be fine :)

Happy hacking,
Giorgos