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Bug 100286 - Emacs / MicroEmacs LiveCD support
Summary: Emacs / MicroEmacs LiveCD support
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: Gentoo Release Media
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Everything (show other bugs)
Hardware: All Linux
: High enhancement (vote)
Assignee: Gentoo Release Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: 281827
  Show dependency tree
 
Reported: 2005-07-25 14:01 UTC by Mike Doty (RETIRED)
Modified: 2010-09-04 10:28 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---


Attachments
1.7 patch (zile_livecd-1.7.patch,469 bytes, patch)
2005-07-25 14:02 UTC, Mike Doty (RETIRED)
Details | Diff
2.0.0 patch (zile_livecd-2.0.0.patch,444 bytes, patch)
2005-07-25 14:03 UTC, Mike Doty (RETIRED)
Details | Diff
2.0.7 patch (zile_livecd-2.0.7.patch,810 bytes, patch)
2005-07-25 14:06 UTC, Mike Doty (RETIRED)
Details | Diff
2.0.7 patch (zile_livecd-2.0.7.patch,279 bytes, patch)
2005-07-25 14:19 UTC, Mike Doty (RETIRED)
Details | Diff

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Description Mike Doty (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-25 14:01:49 UTC
Attached are trivial patches to the zile ebuilds for use with livecd creation. 
the only thing it does is creates a symlink /usr/bin/emacs -> /usr/bin/zile
Comment 1 Mike Doty (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-25 14:02:50 UTC
Created attachment 64297 [details, diff]
1.7 patch
Comment 2 Mike Doty (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-25 14:03:22 UTC
Created attachment 64298 [details, diff]
2.0.0 patch
Comment 3 Mike Doty (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-25 14:06:23 UTC
Created attachment 64299 [details, diff]
2.0.7 patch
Comment 4 Mike Doty (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-25 14:19:49 UTC
Created attachment 64300 [details, diff]
2.0.7 patch
Comment 5 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-25 14:40:52 UTC
Not sure who decided to add the release team on this bug, but we don't use zile
on any official releases.
Comment 6 Mike Doty (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-25 18:11:34 UTC
Chris-

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I would like to explore the possibility of providing
zile on future livecds.  zile is a lightweight replacement for emacs, it's
footprint is allmost as small as nano.  Feel free to RESOLVE LATER, so long as
we can look at it for 2006.0
Comment 7 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-26 06:17:30 UTC
Alright, then allow me to make my position clear.

We have no intentions for adding this to 2005.1's release.  I also have no
intentions for adding this to any future release's minimal CD, as we do *not*
use clones for the simple fact of their limited functionality and because it
causes undue stress from the multiple bug reports about which clone is better. 
Also, vim is provided only because "vi" is part of the POSIX standard.  People
expect it.  Emacs is not.  If you were to get the *real* emacs down to a usable
size, then I would consider it, but otherwise, I would say WONTFIX.

Now, starting with 2006.0, we have the LiveCD in our releases, which includes
the *real* emacs, so this request becomes moot anyway.

So my suggestion is to WONTFIX this bug.  Since it isn't assigned to me, I won't
close it.  I'll leave that up to the emacs team.
Comment 8 Mike Doty (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2005-07-26 08:00:06 UTC
wonderful, I have to download 600Mb of crap I don't want so I can have a 127k
binary for my preferred editor.  I'm closing this as it seems it just isn't
doing any good.
Comment 9 Ulrich Müller gentoo-dev 2008-06-26 09:04:01 UTC
(In reply to comment #7)
> Now, starting with 2006.0, we have the LiveCD in our releases, which
> includes the *real* emacs, so this request becomes moot anyway.

Reopening, since app-editors/emacs was dropped in 2008.0, see (for example)
<http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/releng/trunk/releases/2008.0/specs/x86/i686/livecd-stage1.spec?view=markup>
Comment 10 Ulrich Müller gentoo-dev 2008-06-26 09:15:03 UTC
This is a request for post-2008.0.

Can we have Emacs back on the Live CD? I would volunteer to provide a stripped-down version if disk space is an issue.

If that shouldn't be possible, I would ask to include at least one of the micro-emacsen from  <http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/emacs/editors.xml> instead. Zile would be a good choice.
Comment 11 Ulrich Müller gentoo-dev 2008-06-26 09:20:52 UTC
$ ls -l /bin/nano /usr/bin/zile
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 141236 May 26 12:36 /bin/nano
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 103496 Jun 26 11:15 /usr/bin/zile

$ for i in nano zile; do size=$(qlist $i | xargs ls -l | awk '{ sum+=$5 } END { print sum }'); echo $i $size; done
nano 379231
zile 234331
Comment 12 Ulrich Müller gentoo-dev 2008-07-06 10:52:48 UTC
No live DVD, so there is no Emacs at all on the 2008.0 release media.
Increasing severity.
Comment 13 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2008-07-14 15:01:22 UTC
Uhh, no... it's still an enhancement request...  After all, we're talking about a package which isn't *required* for *anything* but is strictly there to appease people's personal tastes, which isn't a stated Release Engineering goal.

We should look into adding it back for 2008.1's release.  We simply ran out of space for 2008.0, which will likely be the case for the future, too.  In case people are wondering, the first thing to go when we run out of space is "extra" packages such as this that aren't required for installation.  In order of importance, the kernel and hardware support come first, then packages needed for installation, then packages needed for functionality, then packages considered "extra" come last.  In other words, don't expect "extra" packages to always be available on every release.
Comment 14 Ulrich Müller gentoo-dev 2008-07-26 12:50:57 UTC
(In reply to comment #13)
> We should look into adding it back for 2008.1's release.  We simply ran
> out of space for 2008.0, which will likely be the case for the future, too.

Emacs team will be happy to help, if space is an issue. An Emacs 22.2 installation on x86 needs 97 MiB (it was 51 MiB for Emacs 21.4). We could reduce it to about half of that size easily, by not installing any uncompiled elisp files and omitting some parts of the documentation, like PostScript and PDF versions of the manuals.

Even reducing it to less than half the size is possible, but then we would have to remove some functionality (e.g., support for some obscure human/programming languages).

> In case people are wondering, the first thing to go when we run out of space
> is "extra" packages such as this that aren't required for installation.

For sure, $EDITOR is required for installation since users have to edit their configuration files. Considering that Emacs, Nano and Vi (to list them in alphabetical order) are the three most used editors in our community, some fraction of users will be unhappy if their editor variant is not available on the installation media. (I just installed a system from the 2008.0 minimal CD, and editing config files with a foreign editor was a painful experience.)

So, how about the following?
a) Include some Microemacs variant (Zile?) on the minimal CD. See my
   comment #11 about space requirements.
b) Include GNU Emacs (maybe a stripped-down version) on the Live CD. If that
   should not be possible due to space constraints, a) would be a possible
   fall-back solution.
Comment 15 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2008-07-28 19:17:16 UTC
Considering Mike filed this bug way back before the LiveCD, I'm pretty sure that he meant the Minimal CD when he said LiveCD.

Quite honestly, I see no reason to add anything to the minimal.  Again, having a *choice* of editors isn't a requirement for installing.  We provide more than one editor, currently, the Gentoo default, and the POSIX default.  Anything further than that is simply bloat to the minimal CD.  As for the LiveCD, we should provide a *complete* emacs, or none at all.  I'd rather not get into the practice of hacking up ebuilds to make them fit on the LiveCD.

Of course, you may be able to convince the rest of the Release Engineering guys to change standard practices now that I'm leaving Gentoo, so I'll leave this open and let them decide what to do with it, but I see it as essentially a no-op with RelEng simply trying to make sure emacs gets onto the next release's LiveCD.
Comment 16 Ulrich Müller gentoo-dev 2009-05-24 18:16:00 UTC
Since RelEng just has agreed to add 20 MB to the minimal CD [1], I don't buy the size argument any more. Especially if we are talking about something of the order of only 200 kB (see comment #11).

So could zile be added to the minimal CD? I'm sure that a substantial fraction of users would appreciate to have a Micro-Emacs variant available.

[1] http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_101cae1a38b8705b3a06b123f5e09244.xml
Comment 17 solar (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2009-09-14 23:36:41 UTC
Full emacs will be included on the 10.0 LiveDVD release.
Comment 18 Andrew Gaffney (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2009-12-27 16:30:16 UTC
I've added app-editors/zile to the autobuild installcd-stage1.spec
Comment 19 Ulrich Müller gentoo-dev 2009-12-27 17:12:55 UTC
(In reply to comment #18)
> I've added app-editors/zile to the autobuild installcd-stage1.spec

Thank you very much.

>=zile-2.3.13 sets a symlink to zile from /usr/bin/emacs.