emacs and /etc/alternatives

[Bill Nottingham]

Jesse Keating (jkeating at redhat.com) said: 
> obviously you need an emacs-gnome subpackage that introduces the gnome 
> capabilities, while the emacs main package provides you with emacs, without 
> gnome.  This may take significant upstream work, but so be it.

It's not GNOME, per se, but it uses gtk as the widget set for the
menus and (IIRC) pango as the text renderer, as opposed to the obsolete Xaw
widgets & core fonts.

Now, what I wonder is:

GUI:

notting   8220 22.5  0.9  39952 14228 pts/5    S    16:39   0:00 emacs

GUI with -nw:

notting   8089  0.1  0.4  36112  7244 pts/4    S+   16:35   0:00 emacs -nw

-nox:

notting   8042  0.1  0.3   9644  5816 pts/2    S+   16:35   0:00 emacs-nox

Some of the additional memory usage is shared, of course, but it's a
neat trick that the supposedly equivalent -nw version uses four times
the memory. Of course, the binary is also 4x the size, so that may
make sense.

FWIW, I'm of the opinion that no one should be using alternatives unless
they absolutely have to, so I'd prefer the wrapper approach.

Bill