Re: How to choose the right emacs on Ubuntu Linux

[Tim X]

Maindoor <sanjeevfiles@yahoo.com> writes:

> +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
> |Hi,                                                                  |
> |I've been using emacs-snapshot for a while for anti-aliasing support.|
> |But now since emacs itself supports anti-aliasing fonts, I'm now     |
> |left with a dilemma, which one to use.                               |
> |So next I went to find proof of which is latest and bleeding edge.   |
> |and saw the version. emacs-snapshot is of course the                 |
> |latest(23.1.50.1)                                                    |
> |but uses the old GTK+ (2.18.0) version. The emacs package            |
> |version is older (23.1.1) but uses a newer GTK+ (2.20.0) version.    |
> |Can someone provide the pros and cons of each and which              |
> |one might be better to use ?                                         |
> |                                                                     |
> |Thanks.                                                              |
> +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
>

I'm finding emacs support under Ubuntu is beginning to fall behind. For
example, the latest Ubuntu comes with emacs 23.1, but 23.2 has been out
for months. The emacs-snapshot package is also very old and no where
near the latest. 

I add the emacs lisp ppa to my sources and that gets me 23.2

I've also used some of the other PPA's that have more recent emacs
snapshot packages. However, I've found the best solution is to build
from bzr sources. To keep integration with the Ubuntu/Debian emacs
infrastructure, so that I can still use deb packages of some emacs lisp
add-ons, it is necessary to make some changes to the emacs bzr sources. 

The minimum change you need to make is to update the lisp/startup.el
file. You need to add a variable called debian-emacs-flavor and set it
to something like emacs-snapshot and you need to make some modifications
further down in that file to add some load paths. Probably the easiest
way to work all this out is 

1. Install emacs-snapshot package

2. Do a diff between the startup.el file from that package and the one
which comes from the bzr sources. Yolu will see the obvious diffeences
you need to add to the bzr version of that file.

3. Do a normal configure and make bootstrap to compile and build from
sources 

4. (Optional) Install in /usr/local. Remove the site-lisp directory the
installation process creates in /usr/local/share/emacs/24.0.50 and
replace it with a symbolic link the /usr/share/emacs-snapshot/site-lisp

Then your all set. You may want to make modifications to the
/etc/alternatives stuff so that the command emacs runs your version.
Note that most of the changes made above only need to be done once. (you
may need to re-do the symlink if emacs bzr version increases/changes its
version number i.e. to 24.0.90 or 24.1.0 or whatever.). It is also
possible that there may be some changes in the bzr startup.el file that
bzr cannot automaticalloy merge into your modified one. However, this is
very rare and when it has happened to me, the fix has been trivial. 

With this setup, you can now run the Official ubuntu version, the
emacs-snapshot version or your version from the head of the bzr
repository. I find this useful because when you are running the latest
dev sources, there can be short periods of instability and its useful to
be able to revert back to running an older stable version until the bzr
sources get fixed. 

Tim





-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au