Re: Emacs from CVS question

[Tim McNamara]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:

>> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
>> From: Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net>
>> Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2003 09:56:58 -0600
>> 
>> 1.  The Emacs splash screen seems to be missing (I have a different
>> build obtained through the Fink Project which does present the
>> splash screen, v. 21.2.something)
>
> If you invoke Emacs with no arguments, you will see it.  If it still
> doesn't appear, try "emacs -q".

Not that it's actually an issue, of course, it's cosmetic.  However,
as this was my first-ever build I wasn't sure if this indicated
whether I did something incorrectly.  Neither "emacs" or "emacs -q"
results in the splash screen for Emacs (I do get the splash screen
for Gnus, but that was separately obtained from gnus.org and not
through CVS at Savannah).

>> 3.  CVS provides Gnus 5.9 rather than 5.10.
>
> The Emacs CVS has the version of Gnus that the Gnus maintainers
> commit to the Emacs CVS.  If you think it's time for a newer Gnus to
> become part of the Emacs CVS, please talk to the Gnus maintainers
> and ask them to do that.

Well, 5.10 does have some functionality that 5.9 didn't have, and
thus far seems stable and reliable.  Might be worth a nudge to the
Gnus team, to see if they think it's ready.  There may be issues of
which I am unaware.

>> 7.  In /usr/local/bin both emacs and emacs-21.3.50 were installed
>> and appear to be identical- same size, date and when launched both
>> provided teh same version information.  Why was this- something I
>> did with the installation?
>
> These file `emacs' should be actually a hard link to the file
> `emacs-21.3.50' (assuming OS X supports them--I have no idea if it
> does), so that you are looking at 2 different names for the same
> file.
>
> This is how Emacs is built on every other platform.  The intent is
> that when you install a newer version, `emacs' gets linked to it,
> while the older version is left behind, in case you want to
> downgrade to it later.  In other words, it's a feature.

Interesting, and makes sense.  Thank you!