emacs21 on potato..

[Niels Felsted Thorsen <felsted@student.uit.no>]

Hi

I have an old laptop (486DX4-75) happily running potato. I use it for
writing using emacs20 and LaTeX. I usually does that in X, to get
colour syntax highlighting. But emacs21 supports this also in the
console (freeing memory not running X). So I am interested in getting
emacs21 to work on potato, since upgrading to woody isn't worth it on
this old laptop.

I found some info in the "Debian quick reference"

http://qref.sourceforge.net/quick/ch-package.en.html#s-port 

on how to port a package to 'stable'. Downloaded source package for
emacs21, and some dev-libs needed for compiling. Compiled it (took 5
hours I think..) and got a nice deb package.

But trying to install I get dependency errors. Emacs21 depends on dpkg
>=1.9.0 and potato comes with 1.6.15. I guess nothing in emacs21
really depends on dpkg except for maybe the install/remove scripts?
Then I thought, okay I'll port dpkg too. But it depends on even more
packages I didn't have on my system for compiling, and I wasn't sure
even if I compiled and tried to install it, dpkg would complain about
some other dependencies and I'll had to port another package and so
on. Then it would be easier to partly upgrade to woody. But I'm trying
to avoid that, since it will upgrade a lot of packages and programs
tend to get bigger and bigger and I want to preserve disk space and I
don't need the newest on this old machine, except for .. emacs.

So is it possible when compiling from a debian package source to get
around emacs21 dependency on dpkg >=1.9.0? 

Or is it easier to download emacs21 source and compile it 'outside'
the debian package system? (or make my own debian package from the
emacs source? (if I can figure that out..))

Niels

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Niels Felsted Thorsen  _  felsted@student.uit.no  _
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