Re: Lightweight Emacs for container?

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Mon 06 May 2024 at 19:37:39 (+0000), Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum wrote:
> I usually use Emacs on full-blown Debian distributions, so I don't pay much attention to how large it is. But I'm now starting to
> play around with lightweight LXC containers, obviously headless, and would like to keep using Emacs in these, but just for basic 
> text editing and so forth, I don't need a whole IDE environment. But to my surprise, even emacs-nox is a gigantic installation, 
> that even wants to pull in MySQL, for heaven's sake.
> 
> Is there some package, or a simple workaround, that will allow me to use a basic Emacs without all the cruft?

Are you allowing APT to install Recommends and/or Suggests?

If you haven't yet installed emacs-nox, it might be interesting
to see the list of packages you get listed if you:

 $ apt-get -s --no-install-recommends install emacs-nox

as a /user/.

Or OTOH, if you have installed emacs-nox:

 $ apt-get -s purge <MYSQL>

as a /user/, where <MYSQL> is the names of the mysql packages
you're complaining about.

The only mysql package I have (on bullseye, I'm afraid)
is mysql-common (which is very small), and that shows:

$  apt-get -s purge mysql-common
NOTE: This is only a simulation!
      apt-get needs root privileges for real execution.
      Keep also in mind that locking is deactivated,
      so don't depend on the relevance to the real current situation!
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  gsasl-common guile-2.2-libs libgsasl7 libntlm0 mailutils-common
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libmailutils7* libmariadb3* libreoffice-sdbc-mysql* mailutils* mariadb-common* mysql-common*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Purg mailutils [1:3.10-3+b1]
Purg libmailutils7 [1:3.10-3+b1]
Purg libreoffice-sdbc-mysql [1:7.0.4-4+deb11u8]
Purg libmariadb3 [1:10.5.23-0+deb11u1]
Purg mariadb-common [1:10.5.23-0+deb11u1]
Purg mysql-common [5.8+1.0.7]

(I have emacs-gtk installed, rather than -nox.)

Cheers,
David.