Comment 3 for bug 707838

2011/1/27 Göran Uddeborg <email address hidden>

> I certainly will upgrade as soon as possible! When I can choose, I use
> emacs 23. :-)
>
> But in the environment I discovered this, I'm restricted to what comes
> with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and that is emacs 21. Eventually, it
> will be migrated to RHEL 6 which was released a few months ago, but
> enterprise environments rarely move quickly.
>
> --
>
> Wow! I didn't know RHEL5 was that out of date re: emacs. Emacs 22 was
released in June 2007 and Emacs 23 in July 2009. While we use RHEL on many
of our servers, we gave up on the RHEL desktop version as it just got out of
date too quickly. Stability is important in servers, but I think less so for
desktops.

We now allow staff to run whatever Linux desktop version they like, provided
it is a stable release. I make extensive use of tramp and fuse, so there is
no need to run emacs remotely when doing work on any of the servers.

I have recently given up on packaged versions of emacs as so many
distributions seem to be out of date and I kept running into issues that
were already solved in current releases. Even emacs 22 has significant
improvements over 21.

Note that it is quite straight-forward to build and run emacs as a normal
user i.e. no need to run 'make install' as root. So, if the reason you
cannot update to a more recent version is because you don't have permission
to install packages or run as root, you can just do it in your home
directory. You may not be able to have all the new features if you cannot
install necessary libraries, but at least you would be running a current
version.

Tim