Hi I have an old laptop (486DX4-75) happily running potato. I use it for writing using emacs20 and LaTeX. I usually does that in X, to get colour syntax highlighting. But emacs21 supports this also in the console (freeing memory not running X). So I am interested in getting emacs21 to work on potato, since upgrading to woody isn't worth it on this old laptop.
I found some info in the "Debian quick reference" http://qref.sourceforge.net/quick/ch-package.en.html#s-port on how to port a package to 'stable'. Downloaded source package for emacs21, and some dev-libs needed for compiling. Compiled it (took 5 hours I think..) and got a nice deb package. But trying to install I get dependency errors. Emacs21 depends on dpkg >=1.9.0 and potato comes with 1.6.15. I guess nothing in emacs21 really depends on dpkg except for maybe the install/remove scripts? Then I thought, okay I'll port dpkg too. But it depends on even more packages I didn't have on my system for compiling, and I wasn't sure even if I compiled and tried to install it, dpkg would complain about some other dependencies and I'll had to port another package and so on. Then it would be easier to partly upgrade to woody. But I'm trying to avoid that, since it will upgrade a lot of packages and programs tend to get bigger and bigger and I want to preserve disk space and I don't need the newest on this old machine, except for .. emacs. So is it possible when compiling from a debian package source to get around emacs21 dependency on dpkg >=1.9.0? Or is it easier to download emacs21 source and compile it 'outside' the debian package system? (or make my own debian package from the emacs source? (if I can figure that out..)) Niels -- Niels Felsted Thorsen _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _ Borgensvingen 69/201 'v' [EMAIL PROTECTED] <'\_ N-9100 Kvaløysletta / \ o< o< o< \__)== Norway /( )\ \() ()_ _() _/ +47 93002797 ^¨^ ¨ ¨ ¨ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]