Re: Precompiled Emacs

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

I didn't know the answer to this, so I tried it out. Sadly, the answer
is yes, including in the make file as far as I can see. The only reason
that Emacs normally works in this way is because it's already installed.

I tried doing ./configure like so...

./configure --without-all --prefix=/tmp --exec-prefix=/tmp

with the hope that the built emacs could be transferred to another
machine and then make installed, but that doesn't work (I don't quite
know why). Besides you would now be dependent on the build tools which
change over time as others have said.

For travis, I think the best option is to use a PPA and install into
that. Emacs does support multiple minor version installations. But, you
lose multiple platform testing. 

Other than that I am all out of ideas!

Phil




Johan Andersson <johan.rejeep@gmail.com> writes:

> The compile time is an issue on Travis.
>
> If I ./configure, make and re-tar like you say, will there not be any
> hard-coded paths that will be incorrect on some other machine.
> On Nov 4, 2013 3:39 PM, "Phillip Lord" <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Okay, now I understand. This is a good aim, and would be a good thing to
>> do. You are right about wanting to test between point releases -- in
>> fact, for testing, this is more valuable than between major releases, I
>> think.
>>
>> In a sense, I am not sure that I would be worried about speed of
>> installation -- as this is largely useful for package developers, and
>> it's a per emacs release cost (multiplied by the number of machines a
>> developer has).
>>
>> However, given that this is for testing, from my own perspective, I
>> would prefer not to mess around with my main installation; that is, I
>> want my own version of Emacs and the rest of my system untouched. So,
>> why not compile Emacs, and then just launch it from the directory in
>> which it is built? To precompile, simply untar the distribution,
>> ./configure, make, and then retar everything. This should be pretty
>> platform independent, doesn't require root, and if you put everything in
>> one place means a simple delete cleans everything up. It also has the
>> advantage that the Emacs in question is relative clean (i.e. not patched
>> by any downstream distributor) which is a useful test in itself.