[Trisquel-devel] Installing dependencies for latest emacs and gcc releases

[Heime]

Right, let’s get down to it. I’m installing emacs-30.1 from source, using one of the official mirrors. Now, I know some folks would say, “Why not just grab it from the repositories?”—and, sure, that’s the easy road. But if you want the latest and greatest, or you’re after a bit of fine-tuning, building from source is the way to go.

Actually getting Emacs up and running from source on a fresh Trisquel 
system is trickier than it ought to be.  The release notes and INSTALL 
file are all well and good, but they don’t exactly hand you a ready-made 
recipe for Trisquel 11 - no simple, copy-paste commands to pull in all 
the right dependencies

You end up playing detective, piecing it together from hints and 
half-answers.

It would be something if Trisquel could provide a straightforward way for 
users to install the dependencies for the latest development release.  
Just a clear set of steps, tailored for the distro, so we're not left 
scratching our head hard or chasing missing packages for days.

It's not just Emacs, either.  The same goes for GCC and any other bit of 
kit you might want to build yourself.  A bit of coordination between the 
Emacs team and Trisquel maintainers could save everyone a lot of grief 
- especially those new to the game.

As it stands, there are simply too many stumbling blocks.  If we want 
people to actually use the tools we're building, we ought to make it 
just a bit easier for them to get started.