Re: [Swarm-Support] building swarm without emacs

[Alex Lancaster]

>>>>> "AB" == Artem Baguinski  writes:

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

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

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

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

--disable-jdkdir should probably do the same thing as
--without-jdkdir.  We should probably put that in the INSTALL file.

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

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

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

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

Currently Emacs is required even for non-Java builds, I believe if
you're building from source.  

What platform are you using?  If you are on a Linux or Windows
machine, why not use a pre-built binary of a snapshot release?  See:

 http://www.swarm.org/release-swarm-snapshot.html

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

The path of least resistance for you will be to install Emacs.
Really.

Alex