Lab 2

For this assignment, two open source packages with different licenses are to be obtained, built and executed in a Linux environment.

Emacs

The legendary text editor is GPLv3 licensed and its source can be downloaded via the git repository with the following command:

git clone -b master git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git

For the installation, I'll be using the 'betty' AArch64 system. Once downloaded, The first file I opened was the README file, where it stated that the INSTALL file should have the instructions necessary for installation. The INSTALL file states that the installation starts by first running the 'configure' executable, where it tries to deduce the correct values for various system-dependent variables and features. To generate the 'configure' executable, I executed 'autogen.sh'. When running './configure', it stated that I didn't have a package called 'makeinfo' with a version of 4.13 or higher, but that I could rerun the command with the argument '--without-makeinfo' and not have the info pages for Emacs. For the purpose of this article, I ran with the argument.

With the configuration done, the next step is to run 'make', to build the software executable into the 'src' directory. Once done (which took about twenty minutes), Emacs can be executed from its directory. To install it on the system, 'make install' should be run, although superuser privileges are needed.

Ncdu

This is a command line program that analyses disk usage (du) and conveniently displays it with the Ncurses (nc) library. It's a relatively small package, but can be very useful on terminal-only systems (e.g ssh connections). Ncdu is MIT licensed.

Once cloned into betty, I'm ready to start the build. The README file stated that the build should start by running the command 'autoreconf -i' when building directly from the git repository. The rest of the installation is really straight forward. Just running the commands './configure --prefix=/usr' followed by 'make', built the package executable. The build didn't take more than 10 seconds.

Afterthoughts

Building software can take a while, depending on its complexity and size. Emacs is quite a large software compared to other terminal applications (although it might even already come with graphical support out of the box) and it took quite a while for generating an executable. It is a project that has been in development for decades and it only tends to get larger, as its almost religious users keep contributing to its development.

Ncdu is a good example of a lightweight and useful utility. It is intended to do one thing and do it well. It is unlikely that it will become a large application, especially being command line focused, so its build process won't take more than a few seconds.