Re: xemacs and emacs
Steve Hsieh <steveh@eecs.umich.edu> writes:
> Can someone explain why the xemacs and emacs packages can't coexist on the
> same Debian system? (What would it take to make them coexist?)
I have both on my computer at home. All that I know is that there are some
conflict in some few auxiliary binaries like /usr/bin/etags. (There was such a
question few months ago.) Both packages provide them. Such binaries does not
have the same syntax and their usage may be quite different.
Someone mentioned on /etc/alternative. I do not know this well but I think
this could be used to resolve the conflicts. For sure some package would loss
a few of its functionality.
Other idea: split emacs package in emacs and emacs-utils. In emacs-utils you
put all these conflicting binaries. Do the same for xemacs and install only
one of emacs-utils and xemacs-utils. We could have something like:
emacs depends emacsutl
emacs suggests emacs-utils
xemacs depends emacsutl
xemacs suggests xemacs-utils
emacs-utils provides emacsutl
xemacs-utils provides emacsutl
emacs-utils conflicts xemacs-utils (would it be necessary to explicit?)
Another idea: (feasible?) move the conflicting binaries of xemacs to some
internal directory (like we have with movemail, hexl) and configure the
specific variables in site-start if these is a problem.
Perhaps renaming some bins like etags to xetags could be done.
--
Alair Pereira do Lago <alair@ime.usp.br> <http://www.ime.usp.br/~alair>
Computer Science Department -- Universidade de S~ao Paulo -- Brazil
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