On Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 10:44:08AM +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote:
> > Maybe people say so because they expected something else.
>
> "Humor is such a subjective thing!" (B5). My guess is that the quip
> came from an emacs user who was perfectly content with it.
I sensed humor there, but, well... More like sarcasm, rather.
> > Anyway, if you have a decent installation of emacs
>
> Is there a popular distribution of Linux that doesn't have emacs
> either in the base or in its repositories?
Probably no such distro, if popular belongs to one of {Debian, Gentoo,
Slackware, SUSE, RedHat}, or one of their close derivatives.
In case of smaller distro - GRML is one. Nowadays "smaller" means
"fits into CD", or 1GB pendrive. They include ed, forgot about cal. No
emacs, but plenty of interpreters, two gcc's, rudimentary x11 and
browser, antivirus, some other tools. GRML is rescue-cd, I use it to
test if my laptops have what I paid for, and for, er, rescue.
OTOH, I am typing this on ParrotOS (Debian derivative, oriented
towards security, pentest and forensics tasks - I am parroting from
their homepage and I really have no idea what it is) and AFAIR the
default install did not have ed... it is in repos, just not included
in installation image, while umpty-megabytes of visual environment
was, and some "codium" - many megs of dead weight (by which I mean, it
must be useful for somebody else) - was included by default during
postinstall phase... I installed ed because I wanted to experiment a
bit. No problem. I deinstalled (vs)codium (some kind of visual studio
cousin) because I do not want to experiment with this. No problem... I
just noticed that times have changed - some years ago /bin/ed and
/usr/bin/cal were both small and expected to be there (60 kbytes for
ed package and about 1mb for gcal, a modern cal rewrite). Now folks
have no place for this. I remember I had to install few more small
packages to make my parrot usable. Well, good to have it in repos,
good to know what I need.
As of emacs in ParrotOS, they had it in repos, but not as decent as I
wanted. Binaries+compiled ELisp in one package and sources for ELisp
files in another, but I have not found (so far) a package containing
info files with manuals. So I downloaded sources, compiled with
minimal options and installed in some non-relevant dir, this brought
me info files there, and entered INFOPATH variable with some dir into
a script I use to start emacs (I use scripts to start various
complicated programs, I find it less complicated than click-and-pray).
As you can see, everything was in there but it still was fun to make
any use of it :-).
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
