[comp.emacs] compiling Emacs without disk space

jbw@maverick.uswest.com (Joe Wells) (06/25/91)

In article <1991Jun21.040309.26255@leland.Stanford.EDU> fangchin@leland.Stanford.EDU (Chin Fang) writes:

   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)

/tmp is usually big enough to compile Emacs.  If that doesn't work, you
can use symbolic links to do part of the compilation in /tmp and part in
your home directory.  I've built Emacs with a 3 meg quota, no problem.

   Compressed/fully built 386 version of emacs and friends require somewhere like
   four megs.

You can get it a lot smaller than that if you're really pressed for space.
Almost every file in the "etc" directory can be deleted, and about half of
the files in the "lisp" 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.

Aren't users entitled to use their space as they see fit at your site?  Or
are you Big Brother and do you make sure they're using the space only for
administration-approved files?

-- 
Joe Wells <jbw@uswest.com>

peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (06/27/91)

In article <JBW.91Jun24211029@maverick.uswest.com> jbw@maverick.uswest.com (Joe Wells) writes:
> Aren't users entitled to use their space as they see fit at your site?

In general, at most academic and commercial sites, no. 

It's not *their* space.

> Or
> are you Big Brother and do you make sure they're using the space only for
> administration-approved files?

No, it doesn't take big brother. In practice you only need look if
something seems to be wrong (user partition chronically short of disk
space, perhaps. Common sense is all you need.
-- 
Peter da Silva; Ferranti International Controls Corporation; +1 713 274 5180;
Sugar Land, TX  77487-5012;         `-_-' "Have you hugged your wolf, today?"