Re: INSTALL file. Comments.

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:16:19 +0100
> From: "Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com>
> 
> > building form sources is not for the faint of hart and it is the
> > responsability of the person trying to build from source to know their
> > distribution and its package management system.
> 
> Not made clear in any emacs docs IMHO

Nor should it be, IMO.  Building Emacs from sources is actually very
simple, so I'd object to saying otherwise and risking to avert users
for no good reason.

The real problem (and this case just demonstrated it again) is to
configure a system that has the various support packages required for
you to be able to build sophisticated GUI programs.  But this problem
has nothing to do with Emacs: it is common to all GUI packages, some
of them need even more prerequisites than Emacs.

If I were a user of such a system, I'd first spend some time
downloading and installing every library and development package in
sight, prior to building anything of my own.