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From: fangchin@leland.Stanford.EDU (Chin Fang)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted,comp.editors,comp.emacs
Subject: Re: SUMMARY: Super-simple UNIX editor
Message-ID: <1991Jun21.040309.26255@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 21 Jun 91 04:03:09 GMT
References: <1991Jun18.065340.25187@yenta.alb.nm.us> <17174@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <1991Jun21.012239.4994@cbfsb.att.com>
Sender: news@leland.Stanford.EDU (Mr News)
Organization: AIR, Stanford University, CA 94305 USA
Lines: 58

In article <1991Jun21.012239.4994@cbfsb.att.com>, Dan_Jacobson@ATT.COM writes:
|> >>>>> On 20 Jun 91 03:26:55 GMT, fangchin@leland.Stanford.EDU (Chin Fang) said:
|> 
|> Chin> Conclusions: Don't depend anything big and requires root
|> Chin> privilage to install.  => super simplity/smallness is MUST => NO
|> Chin> FSF GNU emacs.
|> 
|> You don't need to be root to install and edit things with GNU Emacs.
                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^

Hmmm... I never said that one needed root privilage to "edit" things with emacs.
You misunderstood me post.

As a SA myself, I said "installing emacs requires root privilage" with the
following understanding:

Whenever BIG disk space is required, root privilage (at least stuff or source
privilage) is required.  I have had a quite interesting discussion with Thomas
at MIT regarding this point.

May I ask you, can anyone at your site write to /usr/local?
               can everyone at your site have more than 20 megs disk quota?
               (and that's just sufficient to decompress and build this thing)

At our site, a typical user has only four megs, I don't think this is even good
for holding the compressed GNU emacs distribution.  I routinely build emacs 
for our four platforms, DECs, IBMs, SUNs,  MIPs, I said "root privilage" required
out of practical considerations.

Let me mention a few more facts regarding sizes:

Compressed/fully built 386 version of emacs and friends require somewhere like
four megs.  The binary is like 0.6 megs after everything is strip(1)-ed and 
mcs(1) -d -ed.  For Suns/DECs, it's like 0.8~0.9 Megs.  For RISC 6000s, the 
dumped version requires 1.7 Megs!  This is just the emacs executable itself!

As another perhaps interesting point here:  If you build emacs on a system
using Berkeley Fast File System (FFS), then a file system's last 10% (?) can be
only written to by root.  An example, say your /usr has 100 megs, and it has
30 megs free space left, and say you are a common user trying to build emacs
in this file system, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO, for the reason given above.

I do agree with you that by itself, GNU emacs never dictates you where to put it's
support files, but if you are (or were) a SA, would you put all emacs stuff in
one directory?  If during account checking, I find someone put a complete 
emacs in his/her $HOME, I would ask this user why, and why indeed.

Now I hope my point is clear.  Emacs is a great editor (in fact a great interface
too, and I often have the suspicision that RMS wants to run UNIX as unix.el 
or unix.elc in it someday :-)


Sincerely,

Chin Fang
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
fangchin@leland.stanford.edu