On a separate note, its unclear to me whether SUNWemacs-nox is a sound
approach for Solaris.
It presents potential difficulties, as there is no precedent (that I'm
aware of) for having the same binary program (/usr/bin/emacs)
distributed by different packages. It potentially raises challenges for
patching, and other sustaining efforts, and I'm not entirely certain
that this has been thoroughly considered yet.
Notably, SUNWemacs-nox would be a strict subset of functionality, and
its main (and perhaps only) benefit would be to reduce the size of the
installation image (e.g. for minimization environments) so that it is
not dependent on X11.
Also notably, emacs runs fine in a tty without X11 running, even when
compiled with X11 support.
Since there is not yet any standard for minimizing Solaris -- at least
as distributed by Sun (and indeed Solaris is already rather large), can
I humbly suggest to the project team that they might want to consider
dropping this portion of the project. Other distribution builders that
want to deliver a system without X11 will have a larger task ahead of
them anyway, and can easily repackage emacs to their own taste if so
desired.
As an alternative, perhaps delivery of an emacs called
"/usr/bin/emacs-no-x11" or somesuch might be a reasonable way to avoid
the confusion from delivering different object files in the same
location, although I still personally feel that there is little merit to
the notion of a version of emacs without X11 support.
(As an aside, in Linux distributions, this is used for environments such
as recovery floppies, and in ridiculously tiny embedded environments.
Solaris is not targetted at any of those environments -- I'm talking
environments with < 16MB of storage here! In Solaris, X11 is a core
depenency, IIRC, and I'm not sure there is an easy way to install it
without it.)
-- Garrett
