XEmacs on GentooXEmacs is a highly customizable open source text editor and application development system. 2. Differences for a Gentoo XEmacs installation Many elisp extensions for XEmacs are distributed as XEmacs packages. Some of these packages are needed for proper operation of XEmacs, such as the app-xemacs/xemacs-base package. Others are XEmacs-specific packages of applications that are also otherwise distributed. The packaged versions are known to work with XEmacs and may contains XEmacs-specific enhancements. In a normal XEmacs installation these packages can be installed using the built-in XEmacs package manager. In Gentoo the packages are provided as ebuilds, making updating and maintenance easier. An added benefit is that the xemacs USE flag can be used to pull in relevant XEmacs packages. For example, when emerging ruby with the xemacs USE flag you will also emerge the app-xemacs/ruby-modes packages, enabling ruby support in XEmacs. You can find the list of all packages in the app-xemacs/* category. You may find it cumbersome to install each XEmacs package individually. The upstream solution to that is the distribution of the SUMO archive, which contains all packages in a single archive. Gentoo takes a different approach. You can emerge app-xemacs/xemacs-packages-all to install all the XEmacs packages that are also distributed in the SUMO archive. This installs all the individual packages. Using the now-obsolete app-xemacs/xemacs-packages-sumo is deprecated, and last rites will be issued for it shortly. The reason for this particular approach is described in https://bugs.gentoo.org/23949. Gnome and GTK+ support in XEmacs currently only supports GTK 1.2 and GNOME 1.x. GNOME 1.x is no longer available through portage and GTK 1.2 is deprecated and will be removed some time in the future. For this reason there are no gnome and gtk USE flags for XEmacs. Upstream development is currently focused on XEmacs 21.5, but this version is currently not yet stable enough for release or day-to-day use. Unfortunately only the 21.5 versions provide proper support for UTF-8, which is becoming more and more a requirement, so we expect to add a 21.5 release to the main tree. Until that time experimental XEmacs 21.5 ebuilds are available from the official xemacs overlay. You can add this overlay to your system using layman.
The following information is only relevant to Gentoo developers or other people who want to update or create ebuilds related to XEmacs. The app-xemacs/* ebuilds in portage are kept up-to-date with the released set of packages using a python script called pebuild originally written by Mats Lidell. The contents of this document are licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution / Share Alike license. |
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