emacs and /etc/alternatives

[Chip Coldwell]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Thursday 08 March 2007 13:01:16 Andrew Haley wrote:
> > Mmm, but that surely means that if you type "emacs foo.c" it'll just
> > say "command not found".
> 
> Which leads us back to the other question, why can't there just be one, that 
> defaults to x if you have x, but alternatively does --nox as a cli option.  
> Package 'emacs' provides just the text method, package 'emacs-x' allows for 
> gui or some such without replacing /usr/bin/emacs.  Just thinking out loud 
> here.

The "--nox" cli option already exists as "-nw".  But that's not the
problem.  The problem is that emacs-22 is now linked to the entire
GNOME infrastructure, so if you install the GUI emacs, you suck in a
lot of stuff.  So if your intention is to run a headless server, you
prefer emacs-nox.

But in both cases, you expect to be able to run "emacs foo.c" from the
bash prompt and it will DTRT.  So /usr/bin/emacs *must* be either a
symlink or a wrapper script (currently, it's a symlink to a wrapper
script).

Chip

-- 
Charles M. "Chip" Coldwell
Senior Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc
978-392-2426