*BSD News Article 94006


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From: token@altair.franken.de (Matthias Buelow)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Emacs
Date: 20 Apr 1997 23:16:41 GMT
Organization: void *
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <5je84p$9fd$1@wuff.mayn.de>
References: <slrn5kvtrt.4ec.beren@pe049.persbraten.vgs.no> <5j4i1p$sjc$14@easystreet03> <5jdk3u$9a9@news.webspan.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: altair.franken.de
Keywords: eight megabytes and constantly swapping
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:39413


In article <5jdk3u$9a9@news.webspan.net>,
Gary Palmer <gpalmer@webspan.net> wrote:

>That's because emacs, when you compile it, checks if you have X
>installed and if so uses it. So most packages we pump out assume you
>have X installed too. Sorry ;-/ Until we get `soft dependancies'
>(i.e. not loading a library until a specific symbol is referenced)
>it won't go away.

How about providing two binary executables of emacs in the package,
one linked against X11 and the other w/o X11 support, or if that
is too much, just provide another package that contains a seperate
character-mode-only or X11 (depending on what's in the default pkg)
executable?  Not everybody wants to recompile emacs on his own (and
that's what the packages are for, aren't they?).
I remember vaguely that an old Gnu/Linux Slackware distribution I
once installed handled it in such a way and think this is a 
Good Thing [tm].

-- 
	--token          *The daemon is free!*

``Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from
  my harddrive.''        - Arthur C. Clarke, imagining the first words of HAL