Re: Suppressing native compilation (short and long term)

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> In any case, I'd let Debian's maintainers make their own choices for
> their own specific needs which are slightly different from ours (where
> our release tarballs and default config are designed in large part for
> users who'll compile Emacs themselves and who install third party
> ELisp packages into their $HOME).

For what it's worth, we've also had repeated requests for additional
variants of emacs.  Right now we have emacs-nox (No X), emacs-lucid, and
emacs-gtk.

The first is often useful for server installs, but we've had requests
for something even smaller, say an emacs-min that configures even less,
and is even smaller (including the dependency tree), for some
situations.  Presumably people who would rather be able to easily use
emacs in some constrained environments instead of nano, zile, vi,
... etc.

We've also for a long time made the emacs-el package (containing all the
.el files) optional for similar reasons (constrained environments), but
we recently had to start requiring it because (not sure why yet) emacs
just crashes in some situations when the .el files aren't available and
when native compilation is enabled.

If it hasn't already been fixed in 28.2 (haven't tested yet), it'd be
nice if we could eventually track that down and then switch emacs-el
back to optional (back to "suggested" in Debian dependency parlance).

We'll likely try to help with that later, after we get the other native
compilation-related issues we've been discussing settled down on the
Debian side.

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