Re: Resources for an old newbie ?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: David Masterson <dsmasterson@gmail.com>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2023 00:26:54 -0700
> 
> >   https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/emacs.html
> 
> Useful, but for Emacs 28.2.  The script I followed above got me
> 30.0.50.

For some value of "got me".

> > This lists all the dependencies, both mandatory and optional.  Each
> > dependency is a link to another page, which describes how to build it
> > (if you don't have it installed already, and cannot download a
> > pre-built package).  If you want to decide which optional dependency
> > you want, read the file INSTALL in the Emacs source tree, it gives
> > that information.
> 
> Yeah, but it gets you into dependency hell as you follow the tree of
> dependencies down.

You must either install the dependencies from some distro (which will
bring their dependencies, recursively), or build them yourself.
There's no way around that.  The good news are that you need only do
that once.

> >> 3. The GNUMakefile in the Emacs distribution seems to rerun configure
> >> with no options, so your "configure" is NO-OP.
> >
> > That's incorrect.  I guess you've misread GNUMakefile.  In reality, if
> > you have run the configure script, GNUMakefile redirects to the
> > top-level Makefile, and that obeys the configure-time options.
> 
> Good point. Configure looked like it worked, but it didn't produce a
> Makefile (and I didn't pay attention to that).  Therefore, when I did a
> make, it saw (via GNUMakefile) configure, but no Makefile and, so, ran
> configure and then used the generated Makefile.  I'm not sure why my
> configure didn't build a Makefile.

It probably failed, that's why.  In that case, it should have ended
with an error message.