Re: Question on updating to 29.1

[Philip Kaludercic]

PierGianLuca <luca@magnaspesmeretrix.org> writes:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm finally getting around to installing Emacs 29.1 (from the tarball,
> on Ubuntu 20.04), and was looking at the options listed by Basile. I
> have some questions or curiosities:

You can always invoke ./configure --help to get a list of all the
possible options along with short descriptions to understand the point.

>> Basile Starynkevitch wrote:
>> 
>>> './configure'  'CFLAGS=-O2 -g' 'CC=/usr/bin/gcc-13'
>>> '--with-native-compilation' '--with-json'
>>> '--enable-link-time-optimization' '--with-x-toolkit=gtk3'
>>> '--program-suffix=-trunk'
>
> – I don't have gcc-13, so I'll skip that.

FWIW usually you don't need to pass configure any flags.  Often enough
it will figure out what it can enabled, depending on what dependencies
are available on your system.  I believe --with-native-compilation is an
exception, though I am not certain...

> – "--with-native-compilation" what does this do? I imagine it's something not 
> specifically related to Emacs.
>
> – "--with-json" ditto?

Others have gone into what this is, but the background might be
interesting: While Emacs has had JSON parsing for a while, it was
written in Emacs Lisp and that turns out to have been too low if you are
interested in using packages like Eglot, the built-in LSP client, that
send around a lot of JSON-formatted data.

> – "with-x-toolkit=gtk3" is this option already chosen by default? I see that 
> the Emacs install instructions say
>
> "If you use exclusively X, do not use the PGTK port.  There are a number of 
> respects in which the regular --with-x-toolkit=gtk build works better"

Whenever I am on an X system, I even prefer using
--with-x-toolkit=lucid, especially if you are the kind of Emacs user
that hides the GUI toolkit (things like the menu, tool or scroll-bar).

> which sounds like "=gtk" is the default
>
>
> Thank you for any info you can share, and for your patience with someone 
> inexperienced with these kinds of installations!
>
> Luca