Re: Installing mew (editing Makefile.in)

[ken <gebser@speakeasy.net>]

Ryo wrote:
> ken wrote:
> [. . .]
>> Thanks very much, Ryo.  I hope mew works.  I've just downloaded and
>> untarred mew-5.1 and know I need to edit the values of some variables in
>> Makefile.in:
>>
>> prefix=@prefix@
>> exec_prefix=@exec_prefix@
>> libdir=@libdir@
>> datadir=@datadir@
>> infodir=@infodir@
>>
>> These are very much standard variables; I've installed emacs from a
>> tarball several times before and it's always been a guessing game,
>> trying to figure out what the values of these should be.  This guessing
>> game is complicated a bit more this time because mew is to work with an
>> installation of emacs which was installed, not for the entire
>> machine/system, but just for one user.  I.e., emacs v.22.0.50.1 was
>> installed under a user's $HOME just for the use of this one user.
> 
> Brave you, Ken. :) I've given up installing emacs for myself for a
> long time, so I'm afraid I can't help you here.  I still install
> small packages from tarballs or sources from time to time, but
> big ones like emacs and TeX are too time-consuming to me.  I use
> Debian GNU/Linux, where most things are available in the form of
> binary packages.  Add-ons to emacs (such as mew) are provided as
> separate packages, which are installed for various versions emacs
> (xemacs, emacs20, emacs21, etc.) automatically.  I know this
> doesn't install things under your home directory. 

I used to install everything from tarballs.  The first Linux I ever
installed, Slackware, was nothing but tarballs.  (It took two or three
weeks to download the distro-- using a 2400bd modem-- and then a day to
install and configure!)  I think since tarballs was all there was and
*everyone* was using them, the documentation was better.  You could see
and understand much better what was going on and it was easier to fix
things that didn't go right.  But Linux systems have gotten more complex
while, at the same time, the documentation has gotten worse, so much so
that it's just not fun anymore.  And it's not just me saying this.  All
my old Linux buddies say the same.


> 
> Anyway, I don't know if it's of any help to you, but I found elisp
> files and their byte-compiled versions of mew in
> /usr/share/emacs21/site-lisp/mew/ .  I hope experts on emacs will
> help you.

Thanks.  Yeah, that sounds like where they should go... normally.  But
again, I'm installing, not for the whole system, but just for the use of
one user.  So the whole install should go under that one user's $HOME.
So the site-lisp directory is at ~/linux/tarballs/emacs/site-lisp/.
Well, so I guess after I install mew there should be a mew directory
there.  We'll see how that goes.


> 
> Regards,
> Ryo

Thanks, Ryo.