JOVE: Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs
by Jonathan Payne (not NOT by Robert Brown
jove Version 4.16.0.65
This is a portable/semimaintainable rpm packaging of jove. Jove
stands for Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs, and in my opinion it has
been the best text editor available for decades (as emacs, its
progenitor, has become ever more crack-ridden until I can no longer
stand to use it at all even as a stand-in for jove). Jove is, in
particular, a really great editor for e.g. C source code, latex source
code, and in general source codes that require an invocation of "make"
to build internally. It has all the essential features of emacs without
losing its attractive sparseness.
Since I use jove exclusively (having done so for getting on 18 years
at this point) and since I also use rpm-based systems exclusively and
rpm-centric distribution tools such as yum, I need jove to be
neatly packaged. The first thing I ever do on a system is go in and
install jove so I can work on it. It needs to be cleanly
rpm-buildable and (I think) distributed as prebuilt source rpm if not
binary rpm for some of the major distributions.
Jove is currently maintained (as far as I can tell) as a tarball-only
product within Toronto's CS
department. From their base, I've hacked the Makefile, the spec
file, and the versions.h file (trivially) as follows:
- Added sed automagic so that version numbers and build date are set
in one place only (the Makefile) and updated to spec file and version.h.
- Added gpg signatures to the rpm's.
- Added a set of macros and targets to support the maintenance of
this website, including targets for "make tgz", "make rpm", "make yum"
and "make installweb". With these targets I can (re)build rpm's for
three or four architectures (e.g. RH 9, FC 2, FC 3, i386, x86_64,
Centos) and install them in yum repositories by "make yum;make
installweb" on each architecture from one set of sources.
- Cleaned up the specfile in some trivial ways that may not be the
best ways to get clean builds on RH/FC-derived rpm systems.
These changes SHOULD NOT affect any other build targets or build
processes (with the possible exceptions of the specfile changes, where I
don't have enough distribution alternatives to test across all of them).
Either way, if you want a repository from which to mirror relatively
current signed jove rpm's, yum update jove rpms, grab a tarball of jove
that has the above make targets for your own local builds, feel free to
use this site.
I'm also willing to provide some debugging support if the
rpm's on this site don't work for you or rebuild for you. I have to
emphasize the some because I have a lot of projects and as long as jove
works for me, I'm happy and may be busy as well as happy. However, if
you encounter a bug or just need some help feel free to contact me at
rgb at phy.duke.edu.
to help spread the word so others can find it as well.
Note, Robert G. Brown is generally either rgb or rgbatduke on many external
sites crosslinked here.