Re: [ANNOUNCE] Emacs 26.1 released

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 31 May 2018, Robert Pluim wrote:

> Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:
> > > Version 26.1 of the Emacs text editor is now available.
> >
> > I tried configuring this new Emacs like
> >
> > ./configure '--with-xwidgets'
> >
> > on a somewhat old (but still supported) Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release but
> > encounter this error:
> >
> > configure:12632: checking for WEBKIT
> > configure:12639: $PKG_CONFIG --exists --print-errors "$WEBKIT_MODULES"
> > Package webkit2gtk-4.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
> > Perhaps you should add the directory containing `webkit2gtk-4.0.pc'
> > to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
> > No package 'webkit2gtk-4.0' found
> >
> > There was no mention in the release notes that versions still in heavy
> > use were being abandoned and that Emacs could only be built on
> > brand-new Linux releases.
>
> Thatʼs a somewhat unfair statement: emacs 26 works fine on Ubuntu
> 14.04 as far as I know, itʼs just the xwidgets support that doesnʼt,
> so in no way is there any 'abandonment' going on.
>
> The change should perhaps have been mentioned in NEWS, but I believe
> xwidgets is still classed as experimental, so perhaps not.

I removed the 'xwidgets' request and then emacs compiles and runs 
fine.  This is good since I must use this Ubuntu version for the 
moment.

The hard configure error which does not indicate to the user what 
corrective action should be taken (other than looking in config.log) 
is not good.

If there are specific package versions required, then they should be 
listed in the installation documentation.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/