Re: Suppressing native compilation (short and long term)

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Even if we are talking about two different users on the same system?
> IOW, this is a system-wide restriction?  Isn't that too harsh?

The available Debian packages are a balance, intended to cover a broad
set of common cases, i.e. Emacs without X, Emacs with the Lucid toolkit
(because of, if nothing else, gtk issues), and Emacs with the GTK
toolkit.

You can only have one of them installed at a time, and you can
(currently) only have one major version installed at a time.

  https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=emacs

We could of course try to accommodate multiple major versions (we did
for a good while), and/or multiple simultaneous variants (nox, lucid,
gtk), but we'd need to feel like the additional complexity and archive
space (multiplied across the architecture-dependent packages
(emacs-bin-common, etc.)[1]) was worth it for a large enough audience.

  [1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=emacs

> And what about users who make changes to Emacs -- is that a legitimate
> use case supported by Debian installations?

I'd say that up to a point you can, and I have symlinked the relevant
.el files into a ~/ directory, made sure that it's in my load-path, and
then made adjustments, but past a certain point, I'd say that you'd want
to switch to building Emacs yourself.

Because at that point, you're perhaps no longer in the target audience
for the Debian packages, or at least non on that particular machine
(i.e. you might be fine with the Debian packages on most of your
machines, servers, etc. but want to make much more extensive changes to
Emacs on some others).

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
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