[Fedora-packaging] Re: Packaging emacs modes: EL/F compatibility

Ville Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
Fri Oct 10 17:12:26 UTC 2008


On Friday 10 October 2008, Michel Salim wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 9:02 AM, Michel Salim <michel.sylvan at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> > When packaging a package that contains Emacs mode files, should the
> > Emacs subpackage require emacs(bin) or emacs?

Depends.  In the vast majority of cases "emacs(bin)", but it the elisp stuff 
specifically requires a full featured/X11 enabled emacs and does not work 
with emacs-nox, then "emacs" would be appropriate.  Ditto for xemacs.

> > emacs(bin) seems to be 
> > commonly used, but this is not provided by RedHat/Fedora Emacs
> > packages until version 22; RHEL 5.2 is still on 21.4 and thus EPEL
> > packages would have to be specially handled.
>
> A related question: why emacs(bin) ?

Most elisp packages work fine with either emacs or emacs-nox installed.  
emacs(bin) is provided by both of them, and requiring it in lisp packages 
where appropriate is helpful so that the full featured (and much more 
dependency heavy) emacs package is not pulled in in setups that are fine 
with -nox, such as headless servers etc.

> xemacs provides xemacs(bin) too 
> so the question applies there. We don't ever plan for the binary to be
> provided in a subpackage, do we?

We already have it kind of that way for both emacs and xemacs.  The emacs, 
emacs-nox, xemacs, and xemacs-nox packages don't contain much more than just 
the respective executable.




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