[ On Friday, December 21, 2001 at 00:06:03 (-0500), Andrew Brown wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: updating emacs Q
>
> maybe it's a tradeoff between how much space it wants to eat up
> vs. features.

If you've already got emacs-20.7, from pkgsrc, then you might be happy
with what you've got, but if you want to install a new emacs and you
have none, then do you want/need 20.7, or will 21.x do?

More to the point, if pkgsrc only contains emacs-21.1, will anyone
really actually _need_ a new build of 20.7?  Will anyone _need_ 20.7
when they install a fresh new NetBSD-1.6 whenever that happens in the
future?  What about with 1.5.3?  Pkgsrc is, necessarily, a moving target
-- emacs-20.7 shipped with 1.5.2, will anyone upgrading _need_ to stay
with 20.7 _AND_ also need to rebuild it with the new pkgsrc?

Yes, 21.x is larger, but not hugely so (not nearly an order of magnitude
more).  If you're an emacs user the added stuff mostly comes in the form
of integration of previously un-integrated packages that you might have
wanted to install anyway.

	$ du -ks /usr/pkg/share/emacs/20.7
	35139   /usr/pkg/share/emacs/20.7
	$ du -ks /usr/local/share/emacs/21.1
	62801   /usr/local/share/emacs/21.1
	$ size /usr/pkg/bin/emacs /usr/local/bin/emacs	# on i386
	text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
	952509  2143768 0       3096277 2f3ed5  /usr/pkg/bin/emacs
	1226854 3290724 0       4517578 44eeca  /usr/local/bin/emacs

I am a very dedicated emacs user and I will only very relucantly go back
to using 20.7 under any circumstances, and never go back to using 19.34,
even though 19.34 was more stable than 20.7.


> most people could *probably* get by with a good old 18.59, right?

No dedicated emacs user could possibly get by any more with anything
less than 19.34, at least not if they knew the difference (will 18.59
even build and work on more than maybe NetBSD/i386 any more?).  I
haven't used 18.59 for almost a decade now!

Anyone who really needs an emacs-like editor but can't stand to dedicate
the resources to 21.1 should probably consider installing editors/jove
instead anyway.

On the other hand I note FreeBSD's ports collection still contains all
of emacs-19.34b, emacs-20.7, and emacs-21.1.  If I'm not mistaken they
can all be installed simultaneously too, though the last one installed
will be the default, I think.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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