emacs and /etc/alternatives

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 20:24 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 12:27:44PM -0500, 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.
> 
> Good question, I guess emacs-nox has the benefit of not pulling in
> half of the X11 libs and is therefore well suited for an X-less
> minimal system.

Er, not as such.  The total disk footprint of _every_ base X library is
about 6M, which includes several that emacs does not depend on.
emacs-nox weighs in at about 5M, but plain emacs is closer to 22M.  So
although emacs-nox is smaller than emacs, you drop more from the emacs
package itself than from the dependency chain.

I would posit, however, that machines where the extra ~20M of disk
reclaimed is meaningful have larger problems than whether to install the
X libs.

- ajax