emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Would it be ok to have a link to emacsforosx.com on the emacs homepa


From: Tim Cross
Subject: Re: Would it be ok to have a link to emacsforosx.com on the emacs homepage?
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2016 12:02:34 +1100

Hi David,

sorry for the slow response. 

to be clear, I think what you have done with emacsformacosx.com is pretty damn cool and I suspect it would be good for many people who are looking to get started with emacs on OS X.  However, I fear such efforts to make life easier for new users can be counter productive because the user themselves can miss some crucial points

I also have no objection to the Emacs docs having some links to resources which can be useful when getting emacs to run on a platform. However, I do think it is important to be wary of giving one particular effort along these lines a pseudo official stamp of approval. It may also be wise to include notes or highlight limitations/differences these efforts create. 

With respect to emacsformacosx.com, I guess I have three broad concerns and I would clearly state that perhaps they are overstated. They probably reflect more my pragmatic nature than anything else. 

1. Yes, the ruby launcher is part of it, as is putting the site-lisp directory in Library/Applicaiton Support etc. While this does seem to be the correct thing to do on OSX, it isn't (IMO) explicit enough and can cause confusion for the end user if/when they run into issues and when they turn to the emacs docs, won't find anything to help clarify matters.

2. Lack of library support. There is a lot of emacs functionality which depends on external libraries. However, as you want to build binaries which run on all systems, you need to build to what is there by default - the lowest common denominator. I've seen a number of people having issues with emacs on OSX because the feature they are trying to use isn't available because the support libs have not been compiled in. While this can be an issue with any of the different methods of installing emacw under OS X, the more removed the user is fromthe process, the less obvious the connection. 

3.  My final point really relates to the previous two and I guess is really a personal preference more than anything else. With emacs in particular, I think it is good to be as close to the build process as possible. However, we also need to make sure it isn't too low level as the barriers to entry would be too high. I guess this is why I prefer a homebrew approach over the emacsforosx.com approach. You are closer to the build and can easily add support for additional libraries. Perhaps more relevant is that homebrew also makes it easy to add those additional libraries - in a sense, gettinng to know a single tool gives you a much broader solution as it also allow you to install things like gnuTLS or libs to support graphics and doc-view etc. 

Something which might help with emacsforosx.com might be to add some additional info tot he web site regarding support libraries and how to add support for particular emcs features - for example, adding gnuTLS support so that things which use https connections can operate or adding support for graphics libs etc. Perhpas making it clear what features that are part of emacs will not work without additional libraries might help (though I also think that perhaps emacs itself could possibly have improved docs in this area - there has been more than once where I've found it challenging to find exactly which libs are needed for a feautre). 

With regard to the general question of having links/pointers to external resources for building emacs on different platforms I'm not sure if this should be in the emacs documentation or whether a better idea would be to refer to a page on a user managed resource, such as the emacs wiki. My preference is for official emacs documentation to reference a page on the emacs wiki which would contain links to various howtos and other external docs relating to installing emacs on various platforms.

Tim

On 12 February 2016 at 23:34, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > This raises the question of whether we should have links to the other builds
  > of Emacs that are in the wild, that users might be interested in knowing about
  > (Nix, Brew, Macports, etc), and how to access them.

Please discuss them with me before adding them.

--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.





--
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross


reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]