PSARC/2008/494 GNU emacs

[Garrett D'Amore]

Jyri Virkki wrote:
> Ali Bahrami wrote:
>   
>> actual emacs binary available. The user has a choice of emacs binaries,
>> and is free not to install the ones that are not of value.
>>     
>
> Actually I did have one comment which I forgot in the joy of just
> seeing this case come in ;-)
>
> "Install" is a system-wide action (ignoring user images here) whereas
> "choice" is individual. Mixing the two is confusing.
>
> Not everyone is on laptops, shared machines are still common, so
> having /usr/bin/emacs trigger behavior on the mere presence of this or
> that package isn't ideal. On a shared server both -x and -nox will
> probably be installed since subsets of users may prefer one or the
> other. I'd rather not have the behavior change suddenly for me just
> because some other user went and installed the -x version. So it sure
> would be nice if I can configure something (an env var, .rc file or
> such) to lock in how it'll behave for me.
>
> There's other ways around that so I don't see it as vital, just a
> suggestion that'd be nice to have.
>   

There is *no* reason to install no-x if you also have -x. The 
functionality is a strict subset, and emacs can always be run without 
X11 by specifying "-nw" on the command line.

However, the case gets more interesting once gtk or athena based 
versions are available. Then choice could indeed play a role, and 
environment variables or some other per-user tunable would be nice. (I 
suppose just running /usr/bin/emacs-gtk or somesuch would work.)

-- Garrett