Re: Documentation bug

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>
> Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 10:33:21 -0800
> 
> Only *VERY* experienced users would know what could be axed, unaided,
> and it seems at least somewhat like the inexperienced user such as
> student users may run into a situation where paring down an emacs
> install is needed.
> 
> A tidbit in info would help a lot with that.  In fact I think it might
> be worth including some general guideline for trimming emacs somewhere
> in the INSTALL file or README etc.

An appendix about a minimal installation is a far cry from a
full-blown documentation of those programs.  I agree that it would be
nice to have such guidelines somewhere in the docs.

> Is etc/term.src critical to tty colors?

Nothing is critical to tty colors except the Emacs binary.  The file
tty-colors.el is preloaded, and the rest of the support is in C and in
other preloaded files.  Even rgb.txt (the one which comes with the
Emacs distribution) can be nuked, since tty-colors.el has its own
copy of the X colors.

> I removed all of the tools in libexec except fns-21*.el .. there were
> no comments in the file so I never figured out what it did.

It tells Emacs which functions are preloaded; this is important for
some documentation features you don't want to lose.

> I removed all info and man stuff, I can always look at that stuff on
> my home install, nearly all of the files in etc, leaving DOC-21.1
> rgb.txt.  I removed term.src which may be the source of my failure.

What failure is that?  If colors don't work, check out the PROBLEMS
file, it has an entry about such problems.

> I got it down to something like 16mb that needed to go in my account
> directory.  included bin, libexec(one file) share etc(DOC-21.l file)

Strip the binaries, especially the Emacs excutable: that would
release a few MBs.  But that comes at a price: you won't be able to
produce any useful information if Emacs crashes.

> Would the bare emacs binary with no *el[c] files be able to produce
> tty colors?

Yes, definitely.  But you should at least keep the file(s) in
lisp/term/ which are loaded by your terminal (look at the TERM
variable and then look for the file by that name in lisp/term; it
might include other files as well).  Color support doesn't depend on
these files, but special function keys support does.