How to install GNU Emacs pretest "emacs-snapshot" on Debian 4.0 Stable Etch

(tags emacs, Linux, Unix, Debian, install)

Let's get right down to installing emacs-snapshot on the Linux distribution Debian 4.0 Stable "Etch":

You have Debian "pinned" to stable ("etch"), right? But you also reference testing and unstable. See Apt-Pinning by Roderick and Jaqque.

In essence, they tell you to modify /etc/apt/preferences and /etc/apt/sources.list, then to run aptitude update to get the new repositories.

Then you can install emacs-snapshot:
sudo aptitude install emacs-snapshot-nox

Then make it the default emacs (/etc/alternative):
sudo update-alternatives --set emacs /usr/bin/emacs-snapshot.

Done!

But is it enough? emacs-snapshot is currently orphaned, and stuck at 22.0.92. The latest is Emacs 22.0.97.

For that you can compile Emacs from CVS yourself with the helpful information from Jorgen Schäfer. It's not that hard at all. Really.

Make sure to reference the Debian 4.0 "Etch" release notes, because gcc is not installed in minimal configuration. Do aptitude install build-essential to pull it in. Also you probably need libncurses5-dev and libncursesw5-dev to get rid of the "emacs: Cannot open termcap database file" error. Strange error. You can actually remove these development libraries and build-essential after the install is successful.

I should reference apt-build as well, but that's for another post.