Hello,
I've been working on getting GNU emacs 22.1 integrated into
Solaris, and have run into a problem that I need some help to
solve.
Emacs can be built in three different ways:
1) Pure tty application (runs in a terminal emulator)
2) Using Athena (libXaw) widgets, which are an ancient
toolkit from MIT X11 days, but which works well
enough with emacs.
3) With GTK
There is an issue with libXaw that means that a binary
built with (2) won't run under OpenSolaris:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=65995&tstart=0
That's going to be fixed at some point, but until then, a binary that
links to it won't work on OpenSolaris.
I have experimented with statically linking libXaw into emacs, and although
that does work, doing so opens a whole raft of legal and technical issues:
legal - I'd have to talk with lawyers for an extended period,
after which they'll probably say no anyway, which is
a waste of time I don't have for something that is a
short term hack.
technical - Gatekeepers frown on crufty code bloat, and along
with agreeing with them, I fear them... :-)
What this means that as things stand today, the GNU emacs that appears in
OpenSolaris will only be able to run as a tty application for some unknown
period
of time until the libXaw situation gets resolved. This may well be what happens,
but I'd like to do better...
Which brings me to the GTK version. Possibly, I could ship a GTK emacs
that would work on OpenSolaris, and which looks better in the bargain.
However, I have a problem to solve first.
I can build emacs 22.1 with GTK, and the 32-bit version does work. However,
it spews a series of assertions to stderr that worry me (the stderr output
is attached). (I've seen this with emacs 22.2 also, don't know about any other
versions).
It's possible (likely even) that this is a simple error in emacs, although I
don't understand GTK well enough to fix that efficiently. If you're deep in
GTK, and have a moment to download and build emacs 22.1, and could send me
patches
for that, you'd be doing a service to the whole community:
http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/emacs-22.1.tar.gz
<unpack, and then>
% ./configure --with-gtk
% make
% src/emacs <<< SHould start quietly
There's more to this than just debugging emacs, and I'd appreciate
any information you might be able to provide. I've been corresponding with
Rich Lowe, who has been building and using GTK emacs on snv_91 without
seeing these errors. We've been trying to find out how our builds differ,
but without much luck.
I sent him a copy of my emacs-gtk binary (that produces the assertions).
When he ran it on his system, it ran cleanly (no asserts). I've tried
snv_95, and Open Solaris, and both produce them. When he ran snv_93 under
Virtual Box, he was also able to produce them.
This is either a difference in the GTK bits between the Solaris versions,
or some sort of environmental issue. It's almost as if there's a 'debug mode'
enabled for GTK. Google brings up nothing other than the GTK_DEBUG environment
variable, which unfortunately does not seem to have a "be quiet" option.
So, if anyone can explain the variability in these messages, or has a proper
fix for emacs (I was kidding about the "be quiet" option), I would love
to hear from you.
Having asked for your help, I should also tell you that I'll be reading mail
only sporadically for the next week (family vacation time). I'll be able to
reply to any messages at least once a day, but there may be a time lag. Sorry
for the timing on this --- I hoped to crack it, and put off sending this
until now when I see my time running out.
Thanks!
- Ali
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