Re: [Orgmode] Emacs 21.4.1 support

[tycho garen]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 12:59:53PM -0600, Dave Täht wrote:
> "Jing Su @ Gmail" <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > I fully understand that Emacs 21 is way out of date. However, since
> > RHEL is one of the mainstream commercial distros, and is common on
> > servers, it would be great if org-mode can be consistent with such
> > industrial standard'' (which is always way out of date :S ). System
> > administrators will take risk to install unofficial org-mode, but most
> > of them won't risk the whole server, i.e., risk their necks, for a
> > newer but unofficial (according to RH) Emacs version.
> >
> 
> No, to heck with that. Most serious users of emacs end up compiling
> their own release, at least until recently, because the official
> releases were so out of date. I would suggest pulling current rpms from
> fedora (maybe they have the equivalent of emacs-snapshot?) And tying
> those on rhel.

A couple of things. Most significantly, I think it's important to
avoid being so blase about supporting this subset of users,
particularly when the answers--with a little bit of digging--are
pretty simple. Having said that, there's a bunch of stuff that
probably won't work, I would offer a number of other possible
solution. 

First, I'd look at EPEL, rather than Fedora as a source for RHEL
packages of more recent emacsen to use. If you can get a version of
emacs 22.(something) there's a version of org-mode included with that
version. So a little hop should be enough to get you basic
functionality. 

If you're running on servers, as it sounds like you are, getting
graphical support for all the new things that have happened in the
last two version of emacs, might be easier. So that while a lot of
things have changed in emacs in the last four years, the subset of
things in emacs that have changed in the terminal mode, might be
somewhat smaller. And really since org-mode is mostly compatible with
emacs22 still (right?), the barrier might be even lower than many
people think, particularly if you're not going for *full
functionality*. 

Having said that, how much emacs hacekry do people do on servers. Even
though I have emacs23-nox installed on my server, I must say that most
of my text-file-editing on the server happens in Zile, which is
just emacs-like enough for me to avoid pulling my hair out, but very
small/lightweight. So I guess after all of that I'm not sure that I
see the use-case you propose.

As an aside, I think OS X ships with emacs21, so it's not just RHEL,
but I think that more people are willing to tinker with OS X than they
are willing to tinker with RHEL. But, if someone is willing to package
(or use the OpenSuSE build process) to make org-mode/emacs23 packages
for RHEL I think sysadmins might be more willing to give it a try,
given the wonders of (quasi)modern package management. 

Cheers,
tycho

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