Re: Documentation bug

[Harry Putnam]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:

>> From: Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>
>> Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 10:33:21 -0800
>> 
>> Only *VERY* experienced users would know what could be axed, unaided,
>> and it seems at least somewhat like the inexperienced user such as
>> student users may run into a situation where paring down an emacs
>> install is needed.
>> 
>> A tidbit in info would help a lot with that.  In fact I think it might
>> be worth including some general guideline for trimming emacs somewhere
>> in the INSTALL file or README etc.
>
> An appendix about a minimal installation is a far cry from a
> full-blown documentation of those programs.  I agree that it would be
> nice to have such guidelines somewhere in the docs.

Yes, an `appendix' is probably the right term.  I didn't think to use
correct terminology.

Not sure what to make of that comment.  I mean, I never proposed
anything fullblown.  But maybe you are not referring to what I
suggested in OP above.  I only suggested the tools in libexec have an
entry in the index. I had in mind the kind of entry that can currently
be found with an `s' search for cvtmail. The one you see if you say `
`info emacs' then press `s' cvtmail<RET>.

>> Is etc/term.src critical to tty colors?
>
> Nothing is critical to tty colors except the Emacs binary.  The file
> tty-colors.el is preloaded, and the rest of the support is in C and in
> other preloaded files.  Even rgb.txt (the one which comes with the
> Emacs distribution) can be nuked, since tty-colors.el has its own
> copy of the X colors.

Thats a good piece of info for someone trying to pare down.

>> I removed all of the tools in libexec except fns-21*.el .. there were

> It tells Emacs which functions are preloaded; this is important for
> some documentation features you don't want to lose.

Ok that confirms my guess.  I'm taking note of these for my next try.

>> I removed all info and man stuff, I can always look at that stuff on
>> my home install, nearly all of the files in etc, leaving DOC-21.1
>> rgb.txt.  I removed term.src which may be the source of my failure.
>
> What failure is that?  If colors don't work, check out the PROBLEMS
> file, it has an entry about such problems.

I mentioned that tty colors didn't work after my experimental build.
That is what I meant by `failure'.  I thought maybe I nuked something
that caused that, like possibly etc/term.src.  But I see from your
comments that is not the case so must be something else.  Maybe the
obnoxious default termon FreeBSD (cons25).  Hopefully your pointer to
PROBLEMS will get me on the right track on that.

>> I got it down to something like 16mb that needed to go in my account
>> directory.  included bin, libexec(one file) share etc(DOC-21.l file)

> Strip the binaries, especially the Emacs excutable: that would
> release a few MBs.  But that comes at a price: you won't be able to
> produce any useful information if Emacs crashes.

Noted

>> Would the bare emacs binary with no *el[c] files be able to produce
>> tty colors?

> Yes, definitely.  But you should at least keep the file(s) in
> lisp/term/ which are loaded by your terminal (look at the TERM
> variable and then look for the file by that name in lisp/term; it
> might include other files as well).  Color support doesn't depend on
> these files, but special function keys support does.

With these tips, I'll experiment further... Thanks
Have to wait until the machine is less busy.