On Thursday 08 March 2007 10:27am, John Dennis wrote: > 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) Couldn't the X capable version be packaged without the X dependencies? IIUC, emacs detection code will work just fine even if the X libs aren't present on the system. Why have packages depend on others if they will work just fine when those "others" are absent. Maybe an example: PackageA can provide feature3 if PackageB is installed/available, but will run just fine if it isn't. In that case, I don't think PackageA should have a dependency on PackageB. Why force me to install PackageB just to be able to install PackageA unless I want feature3? > 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. I would have to agree with you about alternatives being something that average users won't know about, let alone use. I've often thought that the system-switch-mail program should be expanded to (or replaced with by) an alternatives front end. Show a tab for each thing alternatives can switch between. Each tab shows a set of radio buttons to pick the one you want (there are better UI layouts that I can think of, this is just to get the idea across in email). > It also seems to me the nox package exists for a very small subset of > installations (those without any GUI, i.e. servers). I think that there are probably more servers running Linux without X than there are servers & workstations running Linux with X. > In that case the > installer should have enough smarts to install the nox version, Agreed. However, I think there should just be one version without the RPM depending on X. > 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. -- Lamont Peterson <lamont@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Senior Instructor Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ] NOTE: All messages from this email address should be digitally signed with my 0xDC0DD409 GPG key. It is available on the pgp.mit.edu keyserver as well as other keyservers that sync with MIT's.
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