Re: Alternatives for reliable build environments for emacs?

[Daniel Martín]

Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, 28 Oct 2021 at 19:57, <joakim@verona.se> wrote:
>
>> I'm finding it increasingly difficult to build emacs in my distro,
>> Fedora(Ok, I havent managed to build emacs using distro dependencies for
>> a long time)
>>
>> What are the alternatives?
>> I have tried guix and docker but not yet flatpak.
>>
>> These are nice because you can pin the dependency versions, to make sure
>> you have a reproducible build environment.
>>
>> These all have the drawback that they are inconvenient when making local
>> modifications to the emacs source, at least for me. Way back in the days
>> when my original build environment worked, I automatically merged some
>> branches and applied local patchs with stgit, and its these kind of
>> things I've found awkward with the above mentioned containerized build
>> systems.
>
> I’m not an Emacs developer but the issue is familiar. I use Docker for
> similar cases: (1) building software targeting an older version of the
> distribution than is installed on my host system, or (2) building
> software using newer versions of the toolchain than I’m comfortable
> installing on my host machine.

Emacs is a stable software with few dependencies (by 2021 standards), so
I wouldn't expect Docker or similar tools to be necessary at all, except
in very rare situations.

If there are problems building Emacs in some particular platform, I
think it's better to report the errors instead of sweeping them under
the carpet by using Docker or a similar container technology.  I'd say
they are probably bugs in the build files or the toolchains.