Re: How can xemacs have been made so hard to install? Do the developers have any clue it is needlessly hard/undocumented? How do I autoload all libraries?
The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to comp.emacs.xemacs as well.
[To the XEmacs team. Why is Didier's announcement not on the FTP site?]
Hans Reiser <reiser(a)idiom.com> writes:
What in the world possessed them to make it necessary to get five
separate tarballs, and then assemble them together without any
adequate instructions on how to do it?
In fact can you get away with only two files.
What you seem to have missed is the release announcement:
http://www.xemacs.org/list-archives/xemacs/9905/msg00648.html
This is supposed to be available as a README too, but it seems to be
missing. You also seem to be have README.packages which does feature
in at least 3 places. Among others
http://www.xemacs.org/packages/guide.html
The last thing I want to do is pick and choose elisp packages, do
these guys
have a 386 with a ten meg hard drive on their desks? Do they think I have
nothing but time on my hands?
No but other people want to. There's more people in the world than
you. If you don't want that, use the Sumo.
info, etc., subdirectories in /usr/src/xemacs-21.1.4? I still
don't
know, so I tried both, but if somebody knows, I am curious.
They are prebuild parts of the source. They go wherever you unpackaged
the source. "make install" will copy them to /usr/local/lib
So now what I have is an xemacs in which nothing autoloads, none of
the
packages. Why? What do I do to get it to load every package?
Read README.packages. If it is in the right place XEmacs will pick
them up automatically.
Why can't these guys just create one tarball with everything, and
let me type
some finite well documented series of commands, you know, like "cd /usr/src; tar
xfvz xemacs-everything-21.1.4.tgz; ./configure; make; make install; xemacs"?
Why does it have to be more complicated than that?
If you can live with two tarballs here is the complete installation
instructions (for a no-mule XEmacs).
cd /usr/src
tar xzf xemacs-21.1.4.tar.gz
cd xemacs-21.1.4
./configure
make
make install
cd /usr/local/lib/xemacs
tar xzf xemacs-sumo.tar.gz
But please try and read the two links above.
If there is a README I missed, please let me know, but I fear there
is not.
As i said you missed two (with one being not your fault).
Jan
P.S. The package index signing issues is because we fell into a trap
set for us set for us by RSA inc, The US government and the designers
of PGP all working together. This will (hopefully) soon be resolved.