Re: Alternatives for reliable build environments for emacs?

[joakim@verona.se]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: joakim@verona.se
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2021 16:38:54 +0200
>> 
>> >> I'm finding it increasingly difficult to build emacs in my distro,
>> >> Fedora(Ok, I havent managed to build emacs using distro dependencies for
>> >> a long time)
>> >
>> > Why? what are the difficulties?
>> 
>> In my case one of the problems that started the downward spiral was the versions shipped of gnutls in
>> fedora which  didnt work with emacs.
>
> Which version of GnuTLS was that?

From my notes at the time:
------------------------------------
working emacs:
libgnutls-version is a variable defined in ‘C source code’.

Its value is 30615


Broken emacs:
libgnutls-version is a variable defined in ‘src/gnutls.c’.

Its value is 30702
------------------------------------



>
> And what was the rest of the spiral?

Mostly tripping over my own feet, until I got tired of it and ejected my
entire build system and switched to Guix, but the limitation with guix
is I find it difficult to use as a build system for an emacs source tree
kludged together with duckt-tape.

To be clear, Emacs is high quality software, I'm astonished it builds in
as many circumstances as it does. 


>> The separate aproach of building all the dependencies emacs need in a
>> separate build environment does work, like the Guix aproach.
>
> I'd say build all the dependencies that aren't already available, yes.

Thanks

-- 
Joakim Verona
joakim@verona.se