How to install Emacs? (wuarchive's Emacs... Grr.)

[Richard Todd]

alexis at panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:

>Maybe I was spoiled by Cnews, nn, or by the various GNU C, GDB, G++ binaries
>on wuarchive. But when I took the latest GNU EMACS from wuarchive, I was
>very unpleasntly surprised. While the software appears to work with A/UX

Well, I haven't used the GNU Emacs from wuarchive, but instead the one from
afsg.apple.com.  But that one installed correctly.  

>I'll tear out the author's hair...) The instructions say, "type make in the
>emacs directory." This does _NOT_ work. Perhaps if there were some indication
>as to what the name of that directory were supposed to be, it might?

Ok, when you untarred the stuff, you should have gotten a directory named 
something like emacs-18.55, with subdirectories named "src", "etc", "info",
"lisp", and a few others I can't recall.  After checking the config files in
emacs-18.55/src, cd to emacs-18.55 and type "make" and it should work (the
Makefile in emacs-18.55/ basically does nothing except (cd src;make) and (cd 
etc; make)).  If it didn't, yell at the guy who put it there, as it does
in the standard Emacs distrib. and in Ron Flax's A/UX port on afsg.apple.com.

>After messing around with the original GNU documentation for a while I was
>sort of able to make things work. But I'm not pleased with the results.
>I have a typical /usr/local tree containing bin, lib, and src. But emacs
>doesn't seem to want to fit into this mold. I wound up with the entire emacs
>distribution in /usr/local/lib, which is not right.

Ok, lets say you want all the Emacs stuff in a directory "emacs-18.55" of 
/usr/local/lib.  Set the libdir variable in the top-level Makefile to 
"/usr/local/lib/emacs-18.55" and make away.  (This *should* automatically
update the paths.h and paths.el config files, but it's been a while since 
I've done this...)  Then the make install should copy over the etc, lisp,
and info directories over to /usr/local/lib/emacs-18.55 and the Emacs binary
to wherever you specified (usually /usr/local/bin).  You can then blow
away your original Emacs source tree.  There is some stuff in the remaining 
directories (i.e. in "/usr/local/lib/emacs-18.55"), you can blow away if
necessary: the etc directory will have a few source files still in it which
you can nuke, and if you're not going to be doing any local hacks to the 
Emacs-Lisp code, you can ditch all the ".el" files in the lisp directory 
that don't also exist there in compiled form (with a ".elc" extension).  

>BTW, the version I finally managed to make work doesn't support vt100 arrow
>keys. (vi does.) Anyone know how I can enable this?

Hmm.  You running from inside Xterm?  By default it looks like it only enables
the vt100 arrow keys if the TERM variable actually says "vt100".  (Actually,
it looks in the lisp/term directory for a file of Lisp code named after your
terminal, i.e. "vt100.el").  Simply make a link between lisp/term/vt100.el
and lisp/term/xterms.el (or whatever your TERM variable is set to) and your
VT100 arrow keys should be back.  
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us
	rmtodd at servalan.uucp
"Elvis has left Bettendorf!"