Re: Emacs on Hurd
Hi Jerome,
On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 11:52:40PM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> I'm the Emacs co-maintainer for Debian and I've heard that Emacs 21.4
> does not work properly on the Hurd and that people provide Emacs 22
> packages for it.
That would be me. The problem is that for years either nobody built
emacs21 or nobody had the motivation to fix it; either way, after the
libtiff3g->libtiff4 transition, emacs21 needed a rebuild and we found
out it just segfaults once the build system tries to run it (in order to
byte-compile stuff I think). You can see the error and a backtrace here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2005/04/msg00080.html
Now, emacs is pretty important to most people running the Hurd, but so
far nobody stepped up to look into fixing emacs21. We got told that the
CVS version builds fine, but the changes from emacs21 are so enormous
that it is useless as a starting point for fixing emacs21.
> I would advice that Emacs CVS be not distributed as 'emacs22' since
> it has not been released yet and it could confuse people.
That is a fair remark (though the upstream version number
[22+0+20050320cvs] is scary enough that it might make people wonder).
I found the emacs22 source package on the net and rebuilt it. I
actually looked for a emacs-snapshot package first (and found some
mentioning of it), but as I am not in touch with either emacs or Debian
emacs development (not using it myself really), I decided to simply grab
the emacs22 package. In hindsight, maybe I should have better contacted
one of you guys :)
> For quite some time now, I've worked on a package called 'emacs-snapshot'
> and which goals are twofold:
> - preparing the release of the upcoming stable Emacs release
> - providing the cuting edge Emacs as debian packages
Excellent.
> The package is currently neither in sid nor experimental, but I'll make
> periodical releases soon as I get a faster computer.
> However, it is possible to build packages by the means of a script
> I have written, located at:
>
> http://people.debian.org/~jerome/build-emacs-snapshot.sh
>
> Basically, it checks out the current CVS snapshot and grabs the latest
> packaging work from my Arch archive (with bazaar), and build
> packages.
>
> It would be nice if you could test the build on the Hurd and report
> any problem (both in Emacs and in the packaging) to debian-emacsen, so
> we can fix them as quickly as possible.
I just saw that my emacs22 upload to the semi-official 'unreleased'
hurd-i386 .deb archive got rejected, so I will proceed by building these
packages and subsequently remove the emacs22 packages from my repository
at people.debian.org
It might take a while though, as I am mostly busy right now. I will
report back.
BTW, the 'hurd-libio-glibc' patch (which is in the emacs21 and the
unofficial emacs22 packages) is apparently not needed anymore.
cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Banck
Debian Developer
mbanck@debian.org
http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
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