[Swarm-Support] building swarm without emacs

[Artem Baguinski]

hello

emacs is a 20M text editor. i don't want it ;)

in installbook of swarm, chapter "Prerequisite Programs" i see the
following: 

  GNU Emacs. ... Emacs is needed if you want to build Swarm for Java
  from source code...

Well, i don't per se want java support either. It would be nice to have
--disable-java switch in configure.

then, AC_PATH_PROG([EMACS],[emacs],[missing]), is definitelly not the
way to go: missing being called with emacs' arguments gets confused and
breaks build. may be the better solution would have been to forget
altogether about doing all elisp compilation / running (whatever you
need emacs for) if it wasn't found. i suppose that's what you tried to
do substituting it with missing but it aint worked.

i guess the reason was that you all (swarm developers / users) do have
emacs installed and didn't notice that it doesn't work. in a mailing
list i saw somebody earlier this year complaining about related problem,
but this particular piece of configure.in weren't modified. 

now, the question is: Is it possible, theoretically speaking, to build
swarm without having emacs installed? 

if no - a change in installbook is necessary, so people like me won't
get false hopes :)

if yes - i could try to come up with patch to confugure.in /
Makefile.am's that allows to switch emacs/java off. i can test it easily
for i have no emacs on my machine. just don't wanna start to work on
that if it makes no sence. 

cheers,
artm