On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 12:02 -0500, Chip Coldwell wrote: > Currently, there are two versions of GNU emacs that can be installed: > emacs and emacs-nox. The latter runs in a terminal emulator, the > former uses X windows. I'm cleaning up the emacs spec file to meet > the Fedora review requirements, and I think the right thing to do > would be to have > > /usr/bin/emacs-22.0.95 > /usr/bin/emacs-22.0.95-nox > /usr/bin/emacs -> /etc/alternatives/emacs > /etc/alternatives/emacs -> /usr/bin/emacs-22.0.95[-nox] > > In other words, let the /etc/alternatives symlink select which of the > two versions runs by default. > > Is this the right thing to do? > If so, should the emacs-nox package have a "Conflicts: emacs" and > vice-versa? My first question is why we have both an X capable and non-X capable version. The X capable version can run in a terminal emulator just fine with the -nw (no window) option. If DISPLAY is not set it defaults to using -nw, the user is never aware. The only reason I can think of for emacs-nox is linkage bloat and pulling in X dependencies during install (see below) I'm not a big fan of "alternatives", most users don't know about it, it's a bit arcane, and if you're savvy enough to use alternatives you can probably handle invoking emacs with -nw in those instances where DISPLAY is set. Alternatives is not buying much other than a lot of complications. It also seems to me the nox package exists for a very small subset of installations (those without any GUI, i.e. servers). In that case the installer should have enough smarts to install the nox version, in all other cases just install the version of emacs which has the capacity to run in other mode. Emacs will interrogate the environment when it's invoked and in 99% of the cases it will just do the right thing, for the other 1% the command line option exists. -- John Dennis <jdennis@xxxxxxxxxx> Learn. Network. Experience open source. Red Hat Summit San Diego | May 9-11, 2007 Learn more: http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2007 -- Fedora-maintainers mailing list Fedora-maintainers@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers -- Fedora-maintainers-readonly mailing list Fedora-maintainers-readonly@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers-readonly
